TELLURIDE – As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, love is an intense feeling of deep affection. Yet this unadorned definition only scratches the surface of the cavernous well that is love, the most compelling of all human emotions.
Telluride’s Sasha Cucciniello has dipped her red-painted fingers deep into love’s spring to create Love Show, a play that is, simply put, about love. But like Oxford’s simplified definition, “a show about love” is merely an abbreviation for Love Show.
To be candid, Love Show isn’t all about sugar and spice and everything nice. It’s about the kind of love that can be acrid and thorny. As writer and director Cucciniello says, “So often love is talked about as sweet and innocent. But there’s the raw and messy side of love as well.”
Love Show, a play for adults only, chronicles the electrically sex-ified energy radiating between the members of a traveling theatre troupe – the North Jersey Community Repertory Traveling Players Studio Theatre Company, to be precise – who come to Telluride to perform. Locals Tom Shane, Lily Sullivan and Shaun Greager join Cucciniello as the cast of Love Show, making the play a dynamic and unpredictable narrative.
“It’s a journey through love, from young to old, beginning to end,” Cucciniello says, saving the juicy tidbits (Last night’s crumpled panties? Numbers scribbled on bar napkins?) for the show, which opens Sunday, Aug. 17 and runs nightly through Wednesday, Aug. 20.
Love Show is Cucciniello’s second project developed under SquidShow, her homegrown theatre company (which recently received formal nonprofit status under the umbrella of the Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities). SquidShow’s first project, A Day, opened in Telluride last summer to rave reviews. This week’s opening of Love Show marks the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of work for Cucciniello.
The inspiration for Love Show came from selected tidbits of Cucciniello’s own experiences, specifically her time spent on the stage – and behind the scenes – as a lifelong thespian. Cucciniello’s mother was a member of a New Jersey theatre company and she was thus introduced to theatre at a very early age. She pursued theatre interests throughout high school and eventually attended the small art school Bennington College in Vermont. She points to last summer’s play A Day and the real-life interactions between the actors that evolved throughout that performance as the inspiration for this summer’s project.
“I was interested in the idea of love, and our search for it,” she says. “All art is ultimately based in love, either having it or finding it or losing it. It’s one of the most passionate human emotions, and I wanted to explore why love makes us do what we do.”
Cucciniello says that the exploration of love’s darker side is a major creative undertaking, one that she likely would not have embarked upon in a setting other than Telluride. For six years, Cucciniello wrote and directed original plays in New York City with Curious Noise Theatre, which she created with two friends. When she moved to Telluride two years ago, she was struck by the warm atmosphere surrounding the local stage.
“I wouldn’t have had the guts to do Love Show in New York,” Cucciniello says, explaining that the New York theatre scene, and its often jaded audiences, had sapped her creatively. Moving to Telluride opened a new artistic venue for her play writing, and filled a local need for homegrown theatre. Love Show has thus emerged as a “whole” community production, complete with local cast and musicians (Ethan Hale, Ehren Borg and Bubba Lee Schill).
The performances will all be held at the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon on Sunday, Aug. 17 through Wednesday, Aug. 20 at 8 p.m. All shows are free, but donations are welcome. Reservations can be made by calling Cucciniello at 708-3934.
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