In the darkest moments of a family tragedy, when playwright Mona Pirnot couldn’t find the strength to verbalize her feelings to her boyfriend or her therapist, she tried something a little unorthodox: She typed her thoughts on her laptop and required a voice message program to express them aloud.
It was a coping mechanism that also triggered a creative pivot: Pirnot’s then-boyfriend-now-husband, Lucas Hnath, is also a playwright, with a long-standing interest in sound and a more recent history of building shows around disembodied voices. His last play, “A Simulacrum”, featured a magician recreating his version of a conversation with Hnath, whose voice was heard via a tape recording; and his previous play, “Dana H.,” featured lip-synching interviews with the actress in which the playwright’s mother recounted the trauma of the kidnapping.
Now Hnath directs Pirnot, which he wrote and is the sole actor in “I love you so much I could die,” a diaristic exploration of how she was affected by a life-changing accident that incapacitated her sister at the onset of the pandemic. In the 65-minute show, in Off Broadway previews at the New York Theater Workshop, Pirnot sits in a ladder-backed chair, facing the audience, while a Microsoft text-to-speech program reads her lines. Between one chapter and another of the narrative, Pirnot plays the guitar and sings the songs she wrote.
The computer’s voice is male, robotic, and, of course, emotionless; its cadence and length of pauses vary depending on how Pirnot and Hnath punctuated the text. The program makes occasional mistakes — one recurring joke involves Shia LaBeouf’s pronunciation — which the artists appreciate. Hearing a machine tell stories of very human pain can be strangely funny, and the audience laughs, especially at the beginning of the show, as they adjust to the disorienting experience.
“I like the relentlessness I can get with the (computer) voice, which is shocking and surprising, and I find it sometimes very moving but sometimes extremely anxiety-provoking,” Pirnot said. “I actually feel like I was capturing and sharing a little bit of how I felt.”
The production features some of Hnath’s signature fingerprints. Like “The Christians,” his 2015 play set in an evangelical church, “I Love You So Much I Could Die” includes snaking strings and cables, reflecting his preference for transparent scenography. The set, designed by Mimi Lien, is remarkably spare: a folding table, a lamp from the couple’s bedroom, some speakers and, in the corner, a purple container for the show’s only, almost imperceptible, haze effect.
“He’s not that polished,” Hnath said. “It basically announces ‘We’re not pretending.’ We’re just going to work.’ I worried about it turning into a pristine art installation. Every time something gets complicated, I stop trusting or wonder, “What are they hiding?”
Hnath has been experimenting with disturbing uses of audio for some time. “The Thin Place,” his 2019 play about a psychic, and “Dana H.” include moments of deeply jarring sound. And in “Dana H.,” “A Simulacrum,” and now “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” each with sound design by Mikhail Fiksel, there is the separation of speech from speaker, in different ways.
“I think there’s a part of me that, deep down, is a frustrated composer. My first love was music and I always wanted to compose music, so a lot of my approach to playwriting is very compositional,” Hnath said. He likes “the level of control I could have over the sonic qualities and rhythm,” he added. “I can build it so it doesn’t change and that’s exactly what I mean.”
Hnath’s works have often involved what he unapologetically calls “a gimmick” – a task for an actor that leaves little room for error, like an actress perfectly imitating the words, breaths and rhythm of another woman . His later work is about memorizing lines and dramatizes an older performer performing lines with a younger performer; Hnath describes him as “a nightmare to learn – someone gets a line wrong five different ways – I don’t know how you learn”.
For “I Love You So Much I Could Die”, Pirnot and Hnath gradually opted for the text-to-speech solution. Initially, in 2020 and 2021, Pirnot only wrote about her sadness as a way to process her feelings. Some of them were similar to diary entries; some were almost a transcription of conversations with family members. At one point, Hnath thought Pirnot should turn the material into a memoir.
When they started talking about staging the work, it was still the peak of the pandemic, when in-person meetings were tricky. Then they held an advance reading, with the actors, via video meeting; Pirnot and Hnath briefly discussed having his script performed each time by a different actor reading the words coldly.
Pirnot tested the idea of speech synthesis a short monologue podcast. And at home, he worked at the desk at the foot of the bed, which meant that sometimes, when he was sitting up in bed, she would play the material with her back to him, and that arrangement would inform the show as he moved down. their sojourn, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Dartmouth (for a residency), and now the New York Theater Workshop, where it opens Wednesday.
Over time, the story became more about Pirnot’s feelings and less about her sister’s medical situation, which she does not describe in detail in the play.
“Everything that’s included in the show is intentionally referring to the experience of when life opens up and completely falls apart, and what you do with all those pieces and how it makes you feel and how you keep moving forward,” he said. “I felt like I could provide that experience without saying, ‘And by the way, here’s the exact order of an extremely harrowing and relentless series of events that contributed to my new understanding.’”
Why write about something so painful if you don’t want to share the details?
“After fighting so hard to keep a loved one alive, the question becomes: what and why?,” he said. “This is what I have to share. This is really what I want to express. Even though every night I ask myself, “How could I do something like that?” How could I share so much?’, seems less sad than doing something I only put half of myself into.
For Hnath, the collaboration is part of his long-standing storytelling interests.
“One of the first projects I did in graduate school was an adaptation of the Zen koan on Sen-jo. Sen-jo separates from his soul: there is the soul and then there is the body. And what is the real Sen-jo? I think I was a little fixated on the tension between physical and mental or intellectual. So this has always been in the background.