Review: Plenty of Reasons to Love "Love You More"

Love You More

Written by Nikhil Mahapatra

Directed by N // Nicky Maggio

Presented by The Tank at The Tank

312 West 36th Street, 1st Floor

May 29-June 19, 2025

Jasmine Sharma, Omar Rahim, and Mahima Saigal. Photo by Ahron R. Foster

Even before Love You More begins, the set, by visual designer Aoshuang Zhang and featuring the family table sliced cleanly, right through the fruit in the fruit bowl, into two unequal sections, one of which has been shifted ninety degrees up the wall, not only makes an immediate impression but also suggests some of the themes to come. Love You More, by multi-disciplinary writer Nikhil Mahapatra, is loosely inspired by both the playwright's own experiences of family and King Lear; and while we don't see the literal division of a father's assets that drives Shakespeare's play (although it is alluded to at one point as a responsibility that a father should make plans for), Love You More centers temporal, spatial, perceptual, emotional, and even–in its more postmodern, meta moments–ontological divisions in its unfolding familial dynamic. With its lean, funny, and touching writing; well-paced and inventive staging; and outstanding performances, Love You More leaves the audience feeling like a whole theater full of favored daughters.

Jasmine Sharma and Mahima Saigal. Photo by Ahron R. Foster

At the opening of the play, Cordelia (Jasmine Sharma) is back from studying in France for a family visit in England. She is greeted with a favorite cheese (an item that will accrue significance in recurring later in the play) by her father, Lear (Omar Rahim), who feels, at 60, that he has gotten old. The two have some of the disagreements about how much time Cordelia spends at home and what she will do once her studies have concluded that typically come with a child becoming an adult. They also wind up raising the issue of Cordelia's relationship to her sisters, Regan (absent from home and thus from the play), and Goneril (Mahima Saigal), who, reflective of how she feels, is relegated to a background character, present but basically silent, for this portion of the play. Cordelia admits that while she no longer hates her sisters for how they treated her growing up, she doesn't yet know what will replace that feeling–one of the questions that Love You More explores as it proceeds. During these conversations, Cordelia and Lear primarily deliver their lines to different parts of the audience rather than one another, making the exceptions stand out as significant moments of connection. This practice mostly changes when the conversations are primarily between Cordelia and Goneril, a shift that occurs when Lear's illness progresses to the point that he becomes bedridden and requires continuous care (which will be another flashpoint between the sisters). In the production's latter stages, Shakespeare's Lear itself enters the narrative and helps to emphasize the roles that we assume, inside and outside the family, the related choices that we make, and the possibility of changing not only the future but also the past.

Jasmine Sharma, Mahima Saigal, and Omar Rahim. Photo by Ahron R. Foster

Before this, in Lear's absence as patriarch, the daughters sometimes (and, importantly, inconsistently) occupy roles formerly held by the other or by their father, sometimes almost replaying earlier conversations with different participants–a tension, among other things, between influence and self-definition. Lear's being withdrawn into and beyond sickness is staged simply but extremely effectively via, in the former case, some plastic tubing and the actor's positioning within the space, and, in the latter, some black-and-white petals, a chair (again, with positioning important), and a paper bag. Throughout the production, the narrative hops through time like a stone skipping across a lake, temporal leaps forward signaled like small short-outs in reality through Adrian Yuen's lighting design and bursts of static in Joshua Dumas's otherwise subtle sound design.

Omar Rahim and Mahima Saigal. Photo by Ahron R. Foster

Rahim is terrific as the voluble Lear, his typical warmth underscoring by contrast moments when he, for example, harshly and unfairly criticizes Goneril; (he also, in one section, gets the chance to play a contrast to the entire character of Lear). Sharma masterfully inhabits the complexities of the 'good' daughter, including both her first forays into independent adulthood and her guilt and uncertainty, and Saigal is scintillating–and hilarious–as her resentful sister as the two characters try, often tentatively, to feel their way towards one another. Love You More uses these characters to ask questions about the apportioning of love and of duty, whether erasing the bad in one's experience is worth erasing the good, and how (and if) we relate to and with immediate and extended family while charting our own course. Ultimately, the play affirms the idea that parental (and by extension, sibling) love may be neither obvious nor perfect and challenges the idea that there is any correct, regret-free set of choices when it comes to family relationships or to life more broadly–seeing Love You More excepted.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards