A study by a Stony Brook University professor theorizes that if two people answer 36 probing and personal questions, then stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes, they will fall in love.
Perhaps, but that is all playwright Jennifer Lane (Harlowe) had to hear to write a play dramatizing such an unusual exercise. That two-person play, To Fall in Love, receives its Southeastern premiere this month at Florida Atlantic University’s Theatre Lab, featuring the company’s artistic director, Matt Stabile, and his Carbonell Award-winning wife, Niki Fridh.
“When Jenny was coming to town for ‘Harlowe,’ we did a reading of ‘To Fall in Love’ to see what it would look like,” recalls Stabile. “It landed with the audience in a way that we knew we wanted to produce it here.”
But having taken over the artistic reins of Theatre Lab three seasons ago, Stabile assumed he had retired from acting. “Jenny and I got along really, really well and about two weeks later she sent me this play that she had just finished,” he says. “I read it and told it was the first play I’d read in five years that made me want to act again.”
He plays Wyatt and Fridh plays Merryn, a married couple who have separated over a personal tragedy that drove them apart. So their getting together and answering these 36 questions is their last-ditch effort to see whether their relationship can be salvaged.
In the same way that taking these roles was a no-brainer for Stabile and Fridh, he felt there was only one person to direct it – Lou Tyrrell, the company’s founding director and Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Arts.
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“When I gave it to Lou, he said, ‘Yeah, it’s an interesting piece if you have the right dynamic of a cast,’ and I went, ‘I know a cast.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that would work.’
Recalling his first encounter with the script, Tyrrell now says, “It was as if she wrote it for them,” referring to Stabile and Fridh. “Any play that makes me bawl several times as I read it, that’s a good reaction. I just love to cry at the theater. I just knew it was a Theatre Club play,” he adds, a reference to the earliest incarnation of what would grow into Florida Stage. “What was interesting to us was how many people have dealt with, or knew people who dealt with, similar tragedy in their lives. And how it affected their relationship.”
Stabile is skeptical of the claim that these 36 questions can cause two people to fall in love. But, he quickly adds, “I think what the test does in their situation is it unlocks conversations that were buried or that they felt did not need to be said. When you’re with someone for a long time, you think they know everything about you or you think you know everything about them,” he submits.
“And the exercise of the test enables them to talk about things and release things that they were either certain the other person knew or didn’t think the other person needed to know,” Stabile said.
“I think what it does, it just teaches you so much about that person if you’re both doing it honestly,” adds Fridh. “If you’re wondering if you can have a relationship with this person, you could definitely find out by doing this test.”
Fridh objects to the idea that Wyatt and Merryn have fallen out of love. “I think they’re both dealing with grief, but I think they both love each other very deeply,” she says. “My character, Merryn, she’s having a very difficult time with her grief and she’s kind of stuck. She loves her husband but she can’t be with him because he reminds her of their son. Yet she likes to be with him because he’s her favorite person. He makes her forget about the terrible things that are happening in the world.”
This is not the first time Stabile and Fridh have played husband and wife onstage. As he recalls, they were in a play together at the Hollywood (Fla.) Playhouse in 2006. “I was a vet coming home from the Gulf War. It was all about PTSD. At one point I had to rape her and later in the play I had to beat her to death with a baseball bat,” he says. “And my grandmother came to see it.”
Asked how that experience affected their offstage relationship, Fridh notes, “Well, we’re still together.”
And they both readily agree that it is easier for them to do this play because they have a close, long history together. “Here is a married couple in a play that have been together for a long time. They know pretty much everything about each other, they’re completely in love, they’ve been through it all. They can finish each other’s sentences,” says Fridh. “It’s more difficult for two actors who are complete strangers to come in and do that, to create that kind of chemistry than two people that know each other well.”
Among the challenges in the play, and another reason why it is helpful that the roles are payed by a married couple, Wyatt and Merryn have to have simulated sex onstage. At Stabile’s insistence, they brought in Nicole Perry, a certified intimacy director, not unlike a fight director, but for sex.
‘She came in and worked with us in the second week of the process, which we found to be incredibly beneficial,” says Stabile. “It’s not the first time we’ve had to be intimate onstage, but it’s certainly the first time that the theater as an organization supported us, instead of saying, ‘You guys are married, you can figure it out by yourselves.’ With intimacy, it is well-choreographed and then we as actors, our job is to imbibe the choreography, just like any dance sequence, and make it believable.”
“Yeah, Matt was adamant about kind of providing a message for the rest of the theatrical community that this is important and worthy of support,” says Tyrrell. “Particularly these days, with the evolved conversation through #MeToo. It’s something that you’ve got to be very sensitive about.”
Asked about other challenges to succeeding with this play, Fridh says, “The character of Merryn is very complex and complicated, but Jenny makes it easy because her language is so real and honest and genuine and human. I don’t have to work too hard to create this person that’s outside of myself.”
“What I find so compelling is there’s nowhere to hide in this show, you can’t fake any of the moments in it,” adds Stabile. “If you pretend to be listening for five seconds, you’re gone. You have lost the next three moments.”
As to why potential theatergoers should come see To Fall in Love, Tyrrell says without hesitation, “Number one, it’s an extraordinarily beautifully written play. Number two, it’s being brought to life in a definitive way. This is an important little play. And not so little.”
“It feels huge,” chimes in Fridh. “It’s about grief, which is something every single theatergoer who will come and watch it has gone through. I think everyone will be able to connect to it.”
“We’re at a time that there is a lot of grief and chaos and pain. I think what’s most beautiful about this play is that here are two people who are absolutely being driven apart by grief, but they’re doing this because they love each other so much, as an effort to see if they can move past this together,” says Stabile. “There’s no better statement about humanity than that.”
TO FALL IN LOVE, FAU Theatre Lab, Parliament Hall, Florida Atlantic University campus. 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. From Friday, Nov. 19 through Sunday, Dec. 12. $32-$40. 561-297-6124.