Circle Circle dot dot’s “San Diego, I Love You (I Love You Not)” managed to keep its Ocean Beach audience on the move on Feb. 28. Locations changed while the audience sipped beer at a bar, witnessed a fight at a parking lot and followed main characters Jamie and Riley to their favorite spot in this, the theater group’s third “I Love You” entry.
Circle Circle, founded in 2010, writes and produces San Diego-specific plays in an effort to fuel local interest in theater and San Diego history. Mobility is a great challenge to a play, requiring the glue that keeps acting together. Once in a while during the play, the intense chemistry of the characters was not that strong because of the movement.
The beautiful part of the locales, however, is that they are genuine. It’s easy to imagine that break-ups, mourning periods and getting back together actually happen at those alleys, bars, streets and parks in Ocean Beach. The audience doesn’t have to imagine that much.
Playwright Katherine Harroff’s dialogue and Soroya Rowley and Crystal Brandon’s direction were witty, heartbreaking and real. I understood how horrible and demanding we females can be when it comes to relationships, and usually we can’t control it ourselves. Characters Jamie and Riley are a modern, wealthy Western couple who have the luxury of time and space to think about how they feel about relationships and what their future should be. The play portrays how too much thinking messes relationships up and how we settle with compromises even though it sometimes is not good for us.
The actors had internalized the misery of broken hearts, the problems of being together and the hard time being alone. In the final scene, the audience was the judge – it decided whether Jamie and Riley should stay together or break up. It was a brilliant mind game, because it forced the audience to identify with the characters and also to challenge their own mindset about love. When we voted “Stay together,” we were told that we believe in love. Why not believe?