Two Faces of Love

Even with the light at the end of the tunnel growing brighter and larger, the world’s still grappling with the trauma of Covid. That may make this year’s Spring better than last year’s, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be as ordinary and normal as we would like.  Ordinary or not, we are still creatures of nature and thoughts of love will be blossoming right along with the forsythia and tulips.  We can thank the streaming universe for two very different and equally fascinating pictures of what this thing called love looks like from both the realms of fiction and of fact. 

The make believe portrait comes in the form of a play that was at least four decades ahead of its time. Yours Unfaithfully eavesdrops on a couple wading into the deceptive waters of open marriage.  The Meredith’s are so assured in the resiliency of their marriage that they believe it can withstand the test of sanctioned infidelity, Miles Matteson wrote this unconventional story in 1933, long before such arrangements entered the public consciousness.  The play didn’t receive its world premiere until 2013 when New York’s Mint Theatre brought it to their stage.  It’s that performance that’s being streamed through May 16^th, https://minttheater.org/streaming-series/?tab=yoursunfaithfully.   The Mint has long made performing under-appreciated gems a part their mission and Yours Unfaithfully fits perfectly in that model.  Including Max von Essen playing Stephen Meredith and Elizabeth Gray in the role of his wife Anne, the cast of five is sufficiently strong to handle Matteson’s mildly florid, intellectualized language with spry deftness and easy dexterity.  That skill is well suited to the depiction of a posh couple playing Russian roulette with their marriage. 

Netflix teamed with South Korean documentarian Jin Moyoung to give us a completely different take on marriage and brings it to us from the real world.  In some ways, the stories in My Love: Six Stories of True Love are thought to be impossibilities; things of myth.

Moyoung achieved notoriety in Korea by doing something very similar with his My Love, Don’t Cross That River.  That film slides inobtrusively into the lives of Jo Byeong-man and his wife Kang Kye-yeol.  The two have been married 75 years and very much in love with one another for each one of them. She was 14 when she became a bride and called him Sir for their first few years they were together. Now they’re both withered, wrinkled and covered in smiles.  Moyoung has said as a documentarian you’re doing well if 100,000 people see your work.   My Love, Don’t Cross That River captured the imagination and heart of South Korea and became the highest grossing documentary in that country’s history.  With the Netflix project, and working with associate producers around the world, he expands on the phenomenon of lasting love.  In the series of six profiles, viewers have the chance to visualize what 40, 50 and 60 years of healthy marriage looks like.  So far, that picture has been filled with the hallmarks of aging and studded with earned wisdom. It’s also very gentle; with affection running like a clear steady stream throughout each episode.

Broadening his scope, Mo-young doesn’t stop with showing how sustaining love reveals itself from the perspectives of race and culture.  He also crosses the barrier of class and physical impairment to more fully expose the universality of attributes that contribute to long and satisfying unions.  Echoing the mantra of “love is love”, he thoughtfully includes the union of a same sex couple who’ve been successfully navigating the hazards and joys of life together as a committed unit for decades.

When Mallerson wrote about open marriage in Yours Unfaithfully, he may have been voicing his rejection of the rigid rules of propriety he grew up with in England.  His two main characters see themselves as different than regular people.  He’s a writer, enlightened and highly opinionated.  She’s a successful businesswoman whose self-confidence and abilities seem to have freed her from the constraints of conventionality.  Watching her husband languish in a writer’s torpor, she suggests he take on a lover to rekindle his creativity.  Assuring him she’ll be fine with an affair, two months into his seeing another woman leaves her jealous and doubting.  States he did not fall into when she had had her two affairs previously.  He’s proven better equipped to compartmentalize his feeling for his wife and his mistress, a mutual friend of them both, so completely that he would never lose focus on which is the priority.  As the story continues, you begin to sense her commitment to the marriage may not be as unshakable as his.

It’s a scenario you’d hardly consider being played out between the twelve people profiled in My Love; Six Stories of True Love.   Simplicity of language and the purity of small gestures make up a large part of the glue that keeps these couples together.  They’re more than married, more than friends and have moved into some undefined almost ethereal category that defies definition. It’s both rewarding and inspiring to realize the authenticity found in the series is both real and attainable. 

My Love:  Six Stories of True Love

Netflix

Yours Unfaithfully

Through May 15^th

The Mint Theater