a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun) at Tarragon Theatre is a small, fierce machine of feeling: intimate in scale, relentless in emotional pressure, and unmistakably its own theatrical rhythm. Director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu and the Obsidian/Tarragon team deliver a production that honours debbie tucker green’s distinctive language — quick-wit, quick-spoken, often overlapping, and frequently cutting characters off mid-thought as if emotion can’t wait its turn.
From the very first exchange, the ensemble — with standout moments from Dwain Murphy and Virgilia Griffith (among others) — proves how much power sits in both what is said and what is withheld. Characters interrupt, collide, and circle one another verbally, creating a cadence that feels as natural as real conflict and as fragile as real tenderness. Lines land like soft blows: affectionate when needed, blunt when truth needs to surface, and jagged when the characters lose their footing.
Tucker Green’s writing resists tidy summaries. Her sentences loop, interrupt themselves, splinter apart, and reform moments later. Meaning is often implied more than delivered outright. It’s a device that can be energising — audiences are pulled in closer, piecing together relationships from fragments and tone — but it also asks for patience. Under Otu’s direction, this rapid-fire linguistic choreography remains propulsive rather than chaotic, and the minimalist design choices keep the focus on the emotional undercurrents driving each exchange.
If the production has a small challenge, it’s that the deliberate opacity between the three couples’ storylines may leave some viewers wanting clearer connective tissue. Yet that ambiguity is part of the play’s power. Love, longing, frustration, and the quiet disappointments that accumulate between people all coexist in these stories, and the staging refuses to neaten their edges. The result is a portrait of intimacy that is complicated, contradictory, and utterly human.
What ultimately lingers is not a single narrative but a series of emotional impressions: the way two people talk over each other when they are desperate to be heard; the silence that settles after a truth lands too hard; the rawness of words that come out faster than feelings can be managed. This Tarragon production captures all of that with clarity and compassion.
Verdict: See it for the performances, for the language that crackles and stings, and for a playwright unafraid to toy with form to expose the complexity of connection. This is not light date-night fare — it’s theatre that demands your attention and earns it. Playing at Tarragon through Dec. 7; check the box office for schedule details or visit the website.
Audience guide: a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun) Audience Resource Guide
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