Say you just broke up from a serious relationship. You’re raw and lost. The questions of why and what now are abysses you see no way out of.
You might channel the resulting thoughts into a journal entry or a rant to a good friend. You probably don’t make a 100-minute play out of them.
Indulgent, repetitive and trite, “The Last of the Love Letters: A Meditation on Loneliness” seems to want you to project your own memories of hurt onto it, in the mode of a pop song.
Ngozi Anyanwu’s play, whose Crowded Fire Theater West Coast premiere opened Saturday, April 26, at Z Below, keeps characters You (Farrah Hamzeh) and You No. 2 (Gabriele Christian) shadowy everypeople. As one, then the other, recites a long post breakup missive, they reveal maddeningly few concretes, preferring the open-ended abstractions of Top 40 lyrics: “Why did you have to love me back?” “I used to think of you going for a walk, stopping and smelling the roses.” “We did the best we could with what we had.” Cue a torch song’s power chords…