‘Love Note’ by Rogue Artists Ensemble Misdelivers (Review)

Love Note by Rogue Artists Ensemble is a strange show. Not in terms of subject matter, but in the stark contrast between the strength of the material and a, well, complete whiff on how you experience it in person.

Let’s start with the good, though. Love Note is a free, sound-based show that was created with support from the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division as part of their One City One Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival. Though it’s audio-only, it was intended to be experienced at Plummer Park in West Hollywood as a mini walking tour of eight stops around the park, but is also available for anyone to listen to at home.

It tells the story of The Collector, who is searching out stories about “love,” and will then let you listen to some of the stories they’ve collected. Those stories are all ostensibly about love but cover the many kinds of love that you can experience and the full range of emotions that come with any love. The performances are strong all around, and often quite moving because they feel so grounded in the real world, so much so that I wasn’t sure if they were true stories or fictional ones created just for this show.

However, listening to the show in-person at Plummer Park was such a frustrating experience that it took away from what the Rogue Artists were trying to do. Before I drove into West Hollywood, I looked around their web site for anything about how long the experience would take and found nothing. When I got there and started listening to the stories, it quickly became apparent that my initial guess of 30–45 minutes was wildly off and Love Note would be closer to 90 minutes of content. Now, I realize my issue is that “a free show is too long,” but here we are.

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The first problem is that standing around listening to a show on your headphones for an hour and a half in a public park is a little bizarre. Love Note just doesn’t work because the show has little to do with the actual location; Plummer Park itself is also small, so wandering it for that length of time is difficult. The other side effect is that the experience kind of keeps you inside the park and makes you take in everything at once, rather than digesting the story at your own pace as you might from elsewhere. I would have rather done Love Note from a different location where I could walk around a larger space (an idea also hampered by the strange idea to require you to scan QR codes from their virtual map that you probably opened on your smartphone…with your own mobile device’s camera?) or from my own home over the course of multiple sessions.

There were also a few other guest experience areas that faltered including the eight “story” points not being in any particular order (to get from point 3 to 4, you actually have to walk past point 5 and the virtual map isn’t obvious if you’re accessing the in-person experience) and the end of several recordings telling me to go find a place I’d already been to. These are all small things in isolation, but were frustrating to encounter together; the issues seemed to indicate a lack of thought around how people might actually experience Love Note in real life.

Those considerations, or lack thereof, may be even more meaningful with a piece like this where it is freely accessible to the public and to people who aren’t normally fans of immersive theatre. This could have proved an excellent jumping in point for people new to this world, but if I found Love Note a poor experience, so it makes me wonder if newcomers would even take in the whole piece.

Everything in Love Note proved a good reminder of how important it is in immersive theatre that all of the elements be working together seamlessly. Unfortunately, in this case, the imbalance actively made it harder to enjoy the concept and performances of Love Note.

Love Note is available to be experienced in person at Plummer Park in West Hollywood, CA or wherever you are located; the experience runs from May 15 through June 30. Tickets are free.

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