Love (American Style)

Conceived, written and directed by Rochelle Fabb
Co-Directed by Flint Esquerra
Choreographed by Michael Sakamoto

Featuring: Franc Baliton, Anna Dresdon, Flint Esquerra, Rochelle Fabb, Christian Meoli, Michael Morrissey, Marcus Kuiland Nazario, Cindy Pop and Joan Spitler.

Click here to view LOVE (American Style) photos!

PRESS RAVES:

L.A. WEEKLY - PERFORMANCE PICK OF THE WEEK

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RAVE! - THEATER PICK OF THE WEEK

THE ARGONAUT - THEATER PICK OF THE WEEK

"Subversive glee supplies the filigree in LOVE (American Style). Fabb's existential romance should satisfy those who prefer their valentines cut on the metrosexual, necromantic bias…Fabb has comparable fun with this mix of absurdist poetry, emotional friezes and Bettie Page's diary pages…fans of interactive mayhem may picture Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir waltzing along with this madcap danse macabre." – LOS ANGELES TIMES

"A multidisciplinary musing on the subject of love and death…will whisk their audience through spectacle and song, pathos and elation, dance and drama, all enacted by a cast of actors, dancers, singers, a robot (designed by a Battlebots competitor), and in the end, even audience members." – LA WEEKLY

Performed at: Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles, CA February 2004

LOVE (American Style) is an existential romance and theater production that combines cabaret, dance, video and live organ music, inspired by Jean Paul Sartre's "Les Jeux Sont Faits." In this tale an unlikely couple who are actually destined for each other, by a loophole in Fate miss in life and meet in Purgatory and are granted 24 hours back on Earth in which to find missed romance, prove their love and live again. The story questions whether individuals have the ability to change events or if lives are pre-ordained.

In Fabb's production, the lovers are a disabled dominatrix in a neckbrace who cares for sick and wounded soldiers and a web-obsessed, world-weary priest who hears the confessions of his parishioners and enters them into his blog (web log). He also collects computer-top trophies on the Internet as fetishes, which he worships instead of traditional religious icons.

This improbable love story is melded with the tale of the Three Fates whose cosmic trinity is beginning to disintegrate. Chronos, the teller of life's tale who glides upon a robot, longs to become human and taste love after an eternity of "always knowing the endings." Chronos falls in love with the Angel of Death, whose perpetual drudgery in Purgatory is to ready the beds for the incoming "newly deads." Rosy Cheeks (the most feared of all Fates who cuts the cord of Life), longs to take over the power to control lives instead of just ending them. She murders Lachesis, the romantic Fate whose task it is to measure lives and give them a fair share of hope and beauty.

The parallel love stories of Chronos and the Angel of Death and the Comfort Woman and Priest illustrate the cyclical nature of life and love, and the possibility of hope and renewal via human connection. This ambisexual love romp mixes romance, sleaze, desire, ecstasy and isolation into an absurdist carnal feast.

Much of the visual aesthetic is borrowed from documented deathbed hallucinations, which help to draw out the at-once heartbreaking, humorous and transcendent nature of love.

At the beginning of the show, audience members are greeted by the minions of Purgatory and are asked to sign in to an ancient ledger and are given a number by which they will be known in this new realm. When their number is literally up, they can join the cast for a meta-theatrical experience with the actors and dance the symbolic "last waltz" of life.