(The clips are part of footage we filmed  during rehearsals as tryouts, and web PR.)

L.O.V.E. is a fragmented theatrical inquiry into contemporary discourses of love, developed in the spirit of Oulipo, the French literary movement devoted to writing under formal constraints. Rather than pursuing psychological depth or narrative realism, the piece treats language itself as the primary site where intimacy, longing, frustration, and power are produced.

Love here is not approached as a private feeling but as a linguistic and cultural system repertoire of phrases, clichés, expectations, and images through which desire is learned, rehearsed, and performed.

The evening is structured by a simple rule: Four letters/Four acts. 

Each act is governed by one letter of the word L.O.V.E.

Every spoken first line of dialogue begins with that letter.

* Act I – L, She: Life gave me no umbrella…

* Act II – O, He: Out there, nothing feels real…

* Act III – V, She: Very predictable, isn’t it?…

* Act IV – E, She: Except I feel like a cliché…

This constraint serves both as a limit and a generator. It produces repetition, hesitation, circumlocution, and unexpected poetic distortions, mirroring how lovers circle around what they cannot quite say. What appears at first to be a playful device becomes a model of emotional life itself: desire constrained by habit, communication warped by expectation, and intimacy filtered through available vocabularies.

Photo shoot session

• L.O.V.E. proposes that intimacy is not primarily a private emotion but a cultural technology. We learn how to desire, how to confess, how to withdraw, and how to break up through inherited scripts: films, pop songs, therapy manuals, dating apps, social media, and the language of self-optimization of the How To Love books. These scripts do not merely represent love; they actively produce it.To speak of love today is therefore always to quote. We repeat phrases that are older than us. We perform gestures that have been rehearsed millions of times. Even our most sincere confessions arrive preformatted.The formal constraint of this piece makes that condition visible. By limiting speech to a single letter, the performance does not impoverish expression; it reveals how fragile and mediated expression already is. What appears artificial on stage mirrors the everyday artificiality of intimacy in a world of endless profiles, algorithmic matches, and curated selves.In this sense, the constraint becomes a model of contemporary subjectivity. Just as the characters struggle to articulate themselves within their alphabet, lovers struggle to recognize themselves within the languages that are available to them. Desire does not disappear, but it must squeeze itself through narrow channels of recognizability.L.O.V.E. does not argue that love is false. It suggests something more unsettling: that love persists, but only by adapting to the forms that late capitalism and digital culture make speakable. What we experience as romance is increasingly shaped by metrics, images, genres, and expectations that promise connection while quietly regulating it.The tragedy here is not that love fails. It is that love is asked to function inside systems that were never designed for it.What remains, then, is not a grand declaration but a fragile act of resistance: two people, still speaking, still trying to mean something to one another, even when the language they inherit keeps getting in the way.

Emotional Topography

Rather than telling a single story, L.O.V.E. maps a field. The focus shifts from individual psychology to social form: from private feeling to shared scripts.

Love appears here not as an eruption of authenticity but as something increasingly mediated by consumer culture, therapeutic language, cinematic expectation, and endless comparison. Even emotion, when it breaks through, is quickly absorbed back into performance.

There is no climactic betrayal, no cathartic confession. What unfolds instead is a slow erosion of meaning. Love does not fail spectacularly; it simply becomes increasingly difficult to articulate.

The constraint thus becomes existential. Just as the characters struggle against the limits of their alphabet, they struggle against the limits of contemporary intimacy.