The opening line of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” floated into my mind more than once during Tarragon Theatre and Obsidian Theatre’s North American premiere of debbie tucker green’s a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun). Not because the production is bleak, but because few plays capture the aching, uncomfortable distances between people in love with such unsettling and almost clinical stillness.
Structured as three duologues between three Black couples, the play deploys hypnotically fragmentary exchanges to explore the raw machinery of romantic connection: what holds, what frays, and what remains unsaid in intimate relationships. For the first couple, “A” and “B” (Virgilia Griffith and Dwain Murphy), years of bickering over domestic trespasses accumulate into an emotional sediment that the two can barely sift through. For much of their time on stage together, we see A and B spar over forgotten promises and unshared spaces. He sarcastically insists that she never listens, she coolly counters that he hasn’t noticed the TV’s off-button in years, and they circle a memorable exchange about an open bathroom door — while beneath their banter lies the weight of parenting, illness, grief and her retreat into impenetrable months-long silence.
The second pairing, “Man” and “Woman” (Andrew Moodie and Warona Setshwaelo) splinters under the pressure of chronic illness and unspoken disappointment. As they make tea, clean floors, and fold laundry, the couple’s everyday bickering becomes a counterpoint to the larger rift at play: she presses for an apology he won’t give, while he demands the respect he feels he’s owed. The details stay unsaid, but the implications of the fracture between them and its catalysts are unmistakable. And their story ultimately gives way to the Man’s tenuous, searching connection with a much younger woman.
The final pairing — between Younger Woman (Jasmine Case), who is A and B’s daughter and the Man from the second duologue — unfolds as an uneasy, age-gap connection that echoes the earlier couples’ tensions: less explosive, but still charged. The messiness of love, it seems, remains stubbornly the same across generations.
Director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu and assistant director Germaine Konji conduct the triptych with sure, sensitive hands, and the ensemble – especially Griffiths and Case – handle with precision tucker green’s elliptical, rhythmic dialogue, which stacks unfinished thoughts and finishing assertions atop another in pregnant waves of implication and assumption. Griffith’s gift for conveying waves of emotion through even the tiniest shifts in tone and flickers of expression is especially striking.
Despite its almost painful intimacy, a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun) embraces a universality that feels, at moments, like watching love through frosted glass. The absence of names, location, and context — combined with deliberately neutral accents (tucker green is British) and generic costuming in muted shades — creates emotional distance. The stylish, sculptural set by Jawon Kang reinforces the abstraction, its clean lines and floating ledges surrounded by shadows on the wall, framing these characters who seem suspended between connections that bind them and insurmountable chasms that separate them.
And that long, unwieldy and bracketed title, which reads almost like an entry from a grammar handbook, further enshrines the detachment. It’s a giveaway that we are watching less a story than a study: a linguistic diagram of love under pressure and scrutiny. We are certainly invited to recognize ourselves in these couples – and we can’t help but mentally complete some of their tantalizingly unfinished thoughts. But sometimes the abstraction pushes us back into observation, rather than identification. And perhaps that is the point. The full audience program (available online) has links to additional information about the themes explored in the play that are well worth perusing,
What lingers after the show is the boldness and ingenuity of this study and the deftness with which this cast goes under the microscope for it. The show insists that love’s hardest truths reside not in declarations and actions, but in silences, hesitations, and half-utterances. To the question “What’s love got to do with it?”, the answer seems to be “Everything” – even, no especially – when we struggle to articulate it.
a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun), a Tarragon Theatre and Obsidian Theatre Company Co-Production, continues at Tarragon Theatre Mainspace until December 7. 2025. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
