You die. It doesn’t really matter how, but you’re dead. You fell out of a hot-air-balloon, or drowned off the side of a boat, or passed away peacefully in your nineties, with your loving family all around. Suddenly, we pull back. It was all a performance. An authority figure yells, “Cut! Go back to the beginning; let’s try that again!” Wouldn’t that be great? (I imagine the shadowy authority figure as Michael Douglas in the film adaptation of A Chorus Line - a chain-smoking master who watches us all perform, has excellent taste, and the power to determine who stays and who goes.)

Love Story – by the playwright Aurora Stewart de Peña and directed by Rose Burnett Bonczak – plays with a similar conceit to tell a poignant narrative about life, death, and how love and memory connects the two realms. In the world of Love Story, people who have died are able to interact, briefly and ephemerally, with the world of the living, by re-enacting scenes from their past lives. We initially follow a young woman, Maria (a wonderful Ally Callaghan), and a more experienced actress (Yassmin Alers). Maria is dead, and she and the older actress have found an affordable studio space in the afterlife, where they’re conducting a kind of heavenly table read. Maria (who appears, I assume, courtesy of Dead Actors’ Equity), is acting out scenes from her own life, and the other woman reads the stage directions. But it’s not all, entirely, an act – what we see are scenes that actually are happening to Maria and her family during her life. At some moments, Maria and the other actress are definitely dead people, looking back on everything. At other moments, there’s no distinction between now and then, dead and alive, and we’re just watching Maria and her family, laughing and loving each other, before they knew they would lose their daughter.

The metaphysics of this all are appropriately vague, because Love Story is interested in the figurative, spiritual, and emotional connections that still have with the people we’ve lost. Maria died before she got to college, and we see her as a teenager in high school with a loving family: doting brother Marc (Julio Cesar Gutierrez), sweet father Phil (Mickey Ryan), and mother Noelle (Ramona Floyd), a tough matriarch who loved Maria too much to just let her be. Mother and daughter are in conflict: Maria wants to be a YouTuber and a makeup artist, and her mom can’t quite believe that’s a real job. The two lock horns in one of the fundamental forms of human conflict in our society: Youth versus Boomer. (Mom: “Are you uploading these videos to TubeYou?” Maria: “No. I’m uploading them to YouTube.”) We may agree with Noelle that makeup artistry could be a frivolous profession, but many people who started doing that in the 2000s became so rich on filthy YouTube lucre that they could now purchase the New York Jets, so who’s to say what’s a real job or not? 

We learn enough about Maria - brought to life with vibrancy and attitude by Abby Callaghan - that we understand how deep her loss is for her family. She is effusive about makeup artistry and has endearingly big plans for the future: “I thought maybe one day I might have my own line of make-up. I’d write little quotes for the packages, things like ‘Never ask a girl with winged eyeliner why she’s late’ - I don’t know who said that, but I love it!” Maria is a millennial, and Love Story is very attentive to the music, language, and the cultural objects of that time period. If you remember the feeling of putting your thighs into the punishing denim cylinders we used to call “skinny jeans,” you will feel warmly rewarded by the play’s many references to the early aughts. At one point, Maria gets her hands on the nostalgic 90s makeup organizer called a Caboodle: “And all my Urban Decay shadows are in here! The name of this shade is “Asphyxia”. I used to think that would be a really pretty name for a girl.” The woman reading stage directions tells us that “Maria is reading Face Forward, the 2001 book by the iconic makeup artist, and Kate Moss’s best friend, Kevyn Aucoin.” The very specific way that Maria loves all of these little things makes us love her back. She reminds me a little of Lena Dunham’s character from Girls, who had a lot of heart and probably the same granular knowledge of Kate Moss's friend group. 

Love Story is sweet, sad, and often very funny. It mines a lot of humor out of Maria’s larger- than-life-personality. (“Who’s this?” asks brother Marc, looking at a model in a magazine Maria is reading. “This is Linda Evangelista,” she responds with utter scorn.) And there’s a great repeating joke about a watch Maria owns that displays “Internet Time,” a way of telling time in a 24-hour display that was supposedly created by the very millennial-core watch company Swatch. At one point, a character confidently states, “Internet time was invented by Swatch,” a sentence that is so absurd, so chock-full of early 2000s silliness, that it makes me laugh out loud just looking at it on the page.

Aurora Stewart de Peña’s sensitive script – and the table-read conceit, where the dead Maria interacts, somehow, with her family – underline the ways in which those we have lost are always with us. The people we love change us, whether they’re here anymore or not. Maria’s mom Noelle (played very sensitively by actress Ramona Floyd) is eventually affected by her daughter’s passion, and regrets her contempt for the art-slash-career that is makeup artistry: “I was cruel. I was dismissive, and, like, what’s the point of that? I think smart looks a certain way. But what do I know?” And, later, she praises the meticulous artistry behind Maria’s signature look – a type of eyeshadow where the colors blend together to look like the morning sun. “It is exactly a sunrise,” she says, with a mother’s pride. Even little things are passed on: “Why do you put so much cream in your coffee?” asks one character. “I saw your mother do it in a dream,” his dad explains.  I think Stewart de Peña is saying, in part, that letting yourself be affected profoundly by another person – so much that you change the way you act because of them – means a connection that lives past death. We don’t get the chance to have rehearsals for our lives, but perhaps we can take some comfort in knowing there’s no such thing as a final curtain call. Maria fought through the doldrums of high school and the pain of growing up; she held onto her passion, and as a result, her loved ones will never forget it. Who knows? Maybe one day they could be friends with Kate Moss.