Review: “New Love” is Easy to Love (Even When the Love Don’t Come Easy)

New Love

Written by Adam Szymkowicz

Directed by Christy Hall

Presented by brooklynONE productions at bkONE: The Tom Kane Theatre

51 35th St. Brooklyn, NYC

March 5-15, 2026

Brianna Espinal and Isaiah Rothstein

One of the peculiar truths of theater is that intimacy is built not through grand declarations but through repetition. Lines are rehearsed, gestures repeated, rhythms discovered together until something like learned instinct begins to emerge. In Christy Hall’s deftly directed production of Adam Szymkowicz’s New Love, that hard-won instinctive connection becomes the play’s most persuasive argument about the rather grand conceit of romance itself.

From the outset, the play toys with the notion that the audience will ultimately decide the fate of its central couple. Should they remain together? Should they part ways? Yet perhaps the most compelling moments of this two-hander suggest that such questions are beside the point. Love here ironically cannot be voted on, engineered, or logically resolved. It appears instead in fleeting moments of shared rhythm between two people who find themselves, almost accidentally, moving in sync.

Isaiah Rothstein and Brianna Espinal

Hall’s production wisely centers that sense of alignment. The set, already visible when the audience enters the theater, quietly sketches the geography of a relationship in miniature: a bar, a table with two chairs, and a bed. Between these three points unfolds the familiar trajectory of contemporary urban romance: drinks becoming second dates, flirtation giving way to intimacy, intimacy revealing the insecurities that accompany attachment. The staging remains spare but purposeful, allowing the actors to move fluidly between these spaces and the evolving emotional territories of their relationship.

Brianna Espinal’s Suze and Isaiah Rothstein’s Miles meet one another with a strikingly naturalistic ease. Their conversations unfold with the relaxed cadence of people genuinely listening to one another, each interested in what the other has to say. They complete each other’s sentences, trade wry observations about the peculiar logistics of dating, and slip easily from banter to vulnerability, from quips to intimacy. The humor lands particularly well when the play leans into its New York specificity; jokes about New Jersey and the theater world’s peculiar social ecosystem drew warm recognition from an audience clearly fluent in those rhythms.

Brianna Espinal and Isaiah Rothstein

What distinguishes these performances most, however, is their physicality. Espinal and Rothstein continually negotiate the small practical gestures of proximity: passing jackets, dressing and undressing, adjusting the choreography of shared space with the quiet familiarity of people learning one another’s habits. The production’s most memorable moment arrives during a bowling scene in which a ball passes from one actor to the other without so much as a glance. The exchange is seamless, the kind of unconscious coordination that emerges when two people have spent enough time together to anticipate each other’s movements.

Hall mentioned after the performance that this moment required considerable rehearsal to perfect, and it stands as a small triumph of direction. In a play so interested in whether love can be reasoned into existence, the gesture offers a quieter, embodied answer. Connection here reveals itself not through asides, but through a kind of bodily understanding, two performers discovering that their rhythms align.

Isaiah Rothstein and Brianna Espinal

The dialogue supports this intimacy well. Scenes set over drinks, over mini golf, or in the quieter aftermath of sex balance wit and warmth with a disarming casualness. Again, for an Off-Broadway audience steeped in the rhythms of rehearsal rooms and late-night theater bars, the script’s inside baseball moments about running lines and navigating the theater ecosystem land with affectionate precision (and produce a handful of punctuated belly laughs).

By the end of New Love, the question of whether the couple should remain together begins to feel almost secondary - the production’s real achievement lies in capturing the fragile mechanics of connection itself. Like the bowling ball passed between them without a look, the relationship unfolds not as a grand declaration but as a small act of trust repeated again and again. Perhaps that is what love most often resembles in real life as well: not the dramatic decision to stay or go, but the quiet accumulation of gestures through which two people gradually learn how to carry the weight of one another’s lives.

-Noah Simon Jampol