The Invention of Love
The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard’s 2001 play now having a limited run in an elegantly spare, beautifully acted revival at the Theaterlab, satisfies the urge to chew on exquisite language. To revel in words, words, words. To dust off your English-major quote-meter and give it a whirl (spoiler: pegged). And, alas, to wallow in unrequited love, and wonder: I lived; I loved; what did it cost me?
The Invention of Love shows us the life, longing, and love of A. E. Housman (multiple Obie winner David Greenspan), poet and scholar, who begins the show with Charon (Annabel Capper) ferrying him across the river Styx. He is dead, he realizes. His reaction: “Good.”
That is the shortest sentence he utters for the next two and a half hours, as his life unreels in front of us. Housman was a fearsome intellectual snob, and Greenspan’s performance gives that superciliousness its due, complete with the pedantic vocal tic of the Oxford don. He also breaks your heart as emotion simmers under his surface. Beneath the Latin he quotes and his opinions on the nuances of translation lies this: his subject is love, a love he did not have in life.
The Invention of Love is not all action, all the time; not for Stoppard scene after scene filled with incident. Heartbreak suffuses the play, like the river that flows through it – and “the love that dare not speak its name” looms large. This beautiful memory play wallows in ideas, and trying to understand them, and where they come from. Of poetry; of love.
And of beautiful young men. While at Oxford, the young Housman (Yaron Lotan) fell in love with Moses Jackson (José Espinosa), the kind of lovely boy whose athletic body and charming personality would make anyone fall in love. Pollard (Daniel Liu), a fellow student, Jackson, and Housman become close friends; those friendships last a long time, even when Housman fails his final exams and is doomed to the life of a paper-pusher rather than having a meteoric career in academia. (The reason for that, never spoken, becomes clear, though).
Is there a linear plot? No. As directed by Zachary Elkind, the actors move back and forth in time as they hover around and in a stylized boat that stands in for Charon’s ferry and a scull at Oxford, in Bridget Lindsay’s wonderfully pared-back scenic design. Lighting from Paige Seber and Alyssa Korol’s beautiful costumes evoke time and place, as fluid as they are, and original music from Julian Hornik enhances the mood.
Full disclosure: if you have a PhD in English Literature and a familiarity with Housman, his poetry, maybe a bit of his scholarship, you’ll get more of the references here. If you know the names of his professors – they were the giant literary intellectuals of the day — it will help; Pater (Abrar Haque) and Ruskin (Spencer Lutvak) square off with Jowett (Leland Fowler) and Pattison (Sam Bolen). Don’t know them? Doesn’t matter, really; the performers do such a splendid job of embodying the intellectual snobbery of Victorian-era England/Oxbridge superiority, you can get most of it from context.
These same actors also portray the journalists who hound Oscar Wilde (Bolen) to his ignominious fate. You don’t even really need to know Greek myth, upper-class British behaviors and values, and the devastation suffered by gay men in a time when it was shocking, illegal, and appallingly difficult to live as a gay man. Stoppard gives it all to you. Let him.
If you like your language witty and your literary references many; if you like your erudition with a side of heartbreak; if you are ready to indulge in the joy of a world in which thoughts and the words that express them are the most important thing, then The Invention of Love is for you. Catch this rare, brilliant pleasure during its during its too-brief run.
The Invention of Love
At the Theaterlab
357 W. 36th St.
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes, one intermission
Through October 3, 2026
