Chris Bauer, Aubrey Plaza, Mary Wiseman, and CJ Wilson in "Dark Eyes" Photo by Ahron R. Foster

The first piece, "The Broad at the Bar," is a sad duet of loneliness and isolation. An aging "Broad" (Mary McCann) and "Man" (Dion Graham) each deliver interior monologues from separate worlds. Hers is a coarse, racist torrent of filthy sexual boastings, guilt, and self-disgust. His is wistful and reflective, making the "Broad" seem all the more grotesque. It's a tortuous two-hander delivered perched atop barstools in an awkward, static, extended opening scene. One begins to realize this is part of Coen's vision of love.

The second segment, "Dark Eyes," feels like the intended centerpiece. Set in a sitcom-style living room, it introduces five characters. First, two couples: Aubrey Plaza's bigoted, cruel, and profane Susan hires a "tough guy" (Chris Bauer) to rough up her cheating ex, Dan (CJ Wilson), who is now dating Faye (Mary Wiseman), who turns out to be the tough guy's former partner. Women here are rendered as hysterical temptresses or overbearing, emotion-ridden caricatures, while the men who "endure" them are driven to philandering self-pity. The capstone for this sequence introduces Howie (Noah Robbins) in a Jdate-inspired scene involving a Hitler fetish.

By the time the final short piece, "Let's Love," introduces its young couple bonding over a vivid vomiting episode on their first date (a long, drawn-out gag, pun intended), the show has slithered so far down the sewer that what might have played as satire or absurdism just feels like a playwright congratulating himself for pushing filth to the edge before collapsing into trite physical comedy. Thematically, the puke circles back to "The Broad at the Bar," when the Man recalls vomiting on the Pennsylvania state seal during a childhood field trip: "Puking in Harrisburg? I don't think so. She wouldn't get it. A new person, you gotta think about what to say." The final vignette suggests that the young couple's effortless banter and their ability to accept the vomit is what passes for real love. Apparently, in Coen's world, the more you can stomach, the truer your affection.

Authored and staged by two white, heterosexual men who appear to project a universal idea of "love" from their own perspective, the show extends that gaze across every body onstage. In "The Broad at the Bar" and "Dark Eyes," female characters serve as vehicles to utter the playwright's crudest impulses, while male figures stay comparatively restrained, almost pitiable, within their own misogynistic universe. "Dark Eyes" casts men 15–20 years older than their female counterparts, an unsettling imbalance that goes unexamined. Both "Dark Eyes" and "Let's Love" have extended scenes in which two male characters dialogue to commiserate about "the humanity" of women, yet no such exchange exists between women in the absence of men. There is no scene where women characters speak to one another.

Nellie McKay Photo by Ahron R. Foster

That the show remains bearable owes everything to entr'actes performed by Nellie McKay, who glides between segments with savvy, sultry tones, soulfully serenading the audience. Peggy Schnitzer has fashioned a range of looks for this "Entertainer," from tails to lamé lace. The audience can exhale when McKay reappears, her airy voice suggesting a world of feeling Coen's characters can't access. Whether this effect was Coen's point or not (his writing seems so shallow it fails to offer any valuable insight or sharp satire), her numbers function as palate cleansers, musical sorbets between courses of acid.

Design choices literalize the script's limits. Riccardo Hernandez's revolving set attempts snap reveals, but turnovers lag a beat behind the jokes, and its ever-segmented upstage wall reads more clumsy than clever. Love seats offer visual puns. A random print of Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" hovers over a cuddling couple, hinting at gaze, idealization, or paralysis, but the production never earns that allusion. Lighting designer Reza Behjat signals "love" by bathing the opening bar in bruised reds and purples, later brightening the same clichéd palette in the show's final scene.

For all its exclamation mark, Let's Love! confuses cruelty for comedy and explores love more through crude provocations and bodily functions than genuine emotional commitment. If Coen is trying to expose human folly or moral decrepitude, he doesn't build the coherence or analytical distance that true satire needs. In a tacked-on, final tableau, the entire ensemble suddenly joins McKay in a deliberately cacophonous "love song." Perhaps this jam wants to suggest harmony in imperfection, but it plays like a curtain call for ideas unearned.