By Ernest Kearney — There are seldom any survivors when a relationship crashes and burns, just those who walk away maybe a little wiser. That is essentially what Scott Langer’s Thank You For Loving Me, which played during the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival, tries to offer.
August (Langer) and Bobbie (Ashley Fountain) are on the last day of their six-year relationship, the “come and get the rest of your crap” day. The encounter is full of recriminations, repeated servings of “he said/she said” remembrances, the expectant eruption of “cold feet,” and a thin slice of hope. Hope that maybe these two individuals will have learned from the car wreck of passion, which they have just endured.
The performances here are all solid. Langer and Fountain are sincere and painfully believable as the young couple about to re-enter the black hole of single-hood. Sam Quinn as the slacker best friend Sean is sincere and “slackerfully” believable.
It is Langer’s script that is both frustrating and problematic.
Frustrating because it is constructed of moments rooted in a firm reality and full of dialogue that never falters into lame clichés or artificial romantics; problematic because the promise of the piece never translates into a payoff.
There is a definite feeling of “been there/done that” to this piece.
My friend Steve Vlasak, an excellent writer himself, was at this performance with me, and he framed the fault of this work best; “It feels less like playwriting and more like reporting.”
This work does come off like a slice of life, and it, like the journey of the piece, is circular and boasts a very narrow circumference.
That the playwright has thought about the incident and not the meaning of the work is reflected in the flaws of the piece.
First is the character of Sean. Regardless of a fine performance by Quinn, the character itself is hardly more than a cameo and the justification for it is tenuous at best.
Director Jon Cody Andersen shows strong work in guiding the performances, but he is unable to sidestep the inherent pitfalls of the piece, especially the sporadic interruptions of the flashbacks, whose presence in a work this short requires rethinking or elimination.
That Thank You for Loving Me is not lacking in merit should be apparent in the length of this review, otherwise I could have just written “It sucks” and left it at that.
The dialogue and character work here shows that Langer has an ample amount of talent. But talent can suffer when not matched by equal portions of reflection.
Perhaps Langer was satisfied with showing these characters to an audience. But that is the art of portraiture not theatre.
Theatre is in its essence the encapsulation of a journey that illuminates a lesson.
The nature of that lesson doesn’t matter: a moral, a warning, a principle, a belief, a judgment, an opinion – take your pick.
But an audience leaving a theatre must carry with them the sense that they are taking away something they didn’t have when entering.
Langer does tag on an ending to the work in an attempt to show that the characters do walk away from this encounter with some fresh knowledge, but it is only that: “tagged on.” It does credit to Langer’s writing that this sore thumb is not more noticeable.
But he cannot hide the frustration with which one leaves this production.
Audiences want to see those characters they watch on stage learn something, or they want to learn something themselves. Leaving a theatre with neither is frustrating.
Langer in placing too much emphasis on the event of the play and not enough on the eventuality of its central 
encounter makes this reaction inevitable.
For my final review of a Hollywood Fringe Festival 2019 play:
A SILVER MEDAL.
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