Review: It's Not at All Hard to Love "HardLove"

HardLove

Adapted by Esin İleri and Miray Beşli from the original Turkish play by Anıl Can Beydilli

Directed by Jee Duman

Presented by Rue De Pera Films and Sonder Project at SoHo Playhouse

15 Vandam St, Manhattan, NYC

November 6-December 12, 2025

Miray Beşli and Chandler Stephenson. Photo by Arron West

What we refer to as sexual "chemistry" between two people points to an elusive, intangible, and dauntingly complex web of the mental, physical, and emotional. Turkish playwright Anıl Can Beydilli's HardLove, adapted by Esin İleri and Miray Beşli for a Turkish and American co-production that has returned to SoHo playhouse following a successful run at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, immerses audiences deep in the messy hammering out of the boundaries and contours of desire between two characters seeking that "click" during one amorous night together. In this encounter, HardLove offers a boldly probing and thoroughly–sometimes darkly–funny look at a pair of compelling, fully realized characters trying to figure out both each other and themselves.

Miray Beşli and Chandler Stephenson. Photo by Arron West

The pair in question is the Turkish ChiChi (Miray Beşli) and the American Theodore (Chandler Stephenson), who make their first appearance in the play amongst the audience, dancing and making out with one another next to the bar in the downstairs theater at the SoHo Playhouse, an intimate space for a story about intimacy, and one that the production uses to great advantage. When the two arrive at Theodore's New York City apartment for the next stage of their alcohol-fueled hookup, for instance, the stage functions as Theodore's simply furnished bedroom, but the "bathroom" is an area that takes the actors back out into the audience. We don't need to wait long for the first comically awkward moment, when, on her return from the aforementioned bathroom, ChiChi catches Theodore trying to physically counteract some performance anxiety. When the two do get down to business, so to speak, the act is cleverly represented through semi-stylized choreography (by Movement Choreographer Dougie Robbins) that also takes advantage of the intimate performance space, with the actors downstage and orientated towards the audience–although this orientation does, significantly, change with later iterations. In the aftermath, ChiChi expresses doubts about the level of their sexual chemistry, leading the two down a lengthy path of questions, recriminations, revelations, and explorations regarding who they are and what they want (sexually and, inextricably, otherwise).   

Miray Beşli and Chandler Stephenson. Photo by Arron West

In reductive terms, as the characters themselves say, we might see ChiChi, played by Beşli with quicksilver intensity, as the chaos to Theodore's order. Stephenson invests the well-meaning Theodore with the sort of energy that would seem to confirm ChiChi's accusation that he's a "cuddler"–not, a first blush, a good fit for a woman whom we learn likes things on the rougher side and cherishes a fervid fantasy rooted in her conception of sex as a "sacred dance." However, HardLove makes clear that categories and dividing lines and people are never as clear cut as we may expect, or even wish, and both actors peel back further layers of their characters as the play simultaneously builds on and deconstructs our–and their–initial impressions. As ChiChi and Theodore push one another to explore their limits and possibilities, Beşli and Stephenson render palpable both the attraction and tension that crackles between the characters. By the climax, the questions in play are not only of ChiChi and Theodore's compatibility and how their night will end but also (and, again, relatedly) of belonging and existential inertia. HardLove both captures the particular frisson of that period where two people are feeling each other out–and up–for the first time and uses it to open out onto broader examinations of identity and relationship, all in one fantastic, funny hour.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards