Love Us Most At Here For Now Theatre
First, a public service announcement: Please don’t read the programme for Love Us Most, Sara Farb’s world premiere play at Here for Now, before you see the show. I did and expected a very different play from the one I saw.
Love Us Most is a sharply observed, profoundly human, and deeply sympathetic portrait of three actresses of somewhat varied ages sharing a dressing room at a Shakespeare Festival that looks a lot like the one a few blocks away.
Identified by their roles rather than their names, they are playing Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia in a production of King Lear, hence the title. The play takes place before, during, and after a single performance.
All of them have a history with their Lear, Julian Jeffrey (Kevin Bundy), a Festival star of long tenure and great stature who may or may not be in the early stages of dementia. As Love Us Most unfolds we learn the precise nature of those connections, some more fraught than others.
Goneril (Shannon Taylor), the eldest and a Festival veteran, has been more or less assured by Jeffrey that she will be playing Isabella opposite Jeffrey’s Angelo in next season’s production of Measure For Measure. Still, she will have to audition and has brought the scene she must prepare to the theatre.
For those who have not recently brushed up their Shakespeare, Angelo is a villainous character who tries to get the beautiful virgin, Isabella – a nun no less! – to sleep with him in exchange for sparing her brother’s life. Knowing this adds a certain frisson to the themes touched on in Love Us Most.
Goneril is understandably surprised to find that the twenty-four year old Black actress playing Cordelia (Jasmine Case) is also being auditioned for Isabella and has brought along the same scene.
Regan (Zara Jestadt) is the only one of the trio not under consideration for this plum part and it doesn’t seem to phase her in the least. When Julian drops by after the show to visit her, we get a sense of why that is.
Love Us Most belongs to a category of play that I find especially appealing. It is a seemingly plotless, fly-on-the-wall depiction of a workplace in which the characters simply go about doing their jobs as relationships, backstories, and secrets are gradually revealed.
Cordelia reveals that Julian recently invited her into his dressing room after a show, closed the door, and showed her photos from his early career and made a remark that profoundly unsettled her. Sexual harassment? You’ll have to decide. The other women agree that the encounter was “creepy” although there was no physical contact. They seem genuinely supportive, but are they really?
Others in the Love Me Most cast have their own secrets, but revealing them would spoil the show if you go see it. So I’ll just urge you to do so, especially if you have any interest in or experience of the fraught reckoning that took place at the Stratford Festival in 2020 on Twitter under the hashtag #InTheDressingRoom.
Director Sabryn Rock, working with a very talented cast, has done a masterful job of ushering us into the behind-the-scenes world of a great theatre. So palpable is the sense of verisimilitude in the performances that Love Us Most is experienced more as a documentary than a work of fiction.
To her great credit Farb does not use the women in Love Us Most to level the kind of screed the programme notes had led me to expect. Indeed, many of the themes of ageism, racism, and inappropriate sexual conduct in the theatre are made manifest in the actresses themselves. Theatre is a highly competitive environment after all and the strains of rivalry in the battle to succeed exact a price.
The three actresses in Love Us Most navigate workplace politics that may be unique in some ways to theatre but that will be recognizable to anyone who has worked in a large, hierarchical organization. Surely it is the rare workplace in which no woman has experienced an uncomfortable sexually-charged exchange with an older male colleague.
As I mentioned, Rock’s production is exemplary. She has worked with lighting designer Darren Burkett to punctuate the proceedings with some very nice effects. I especially admired Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design. A recalcitrant toilet, just offstage, is virtually another character in the play. At one point the orientation of the dressing room is changed and the offstage toilet moves right along with it, a small but rather brilliant touch.
Love Us Most continues at Here For Now Theatre through June 28, 2026. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Here For Now Theatre website.
Footnote: The multi-talented Farb, who has also written the book to several musicals, is playing Fanny Brice in Funny Girl at the Shaw Festival this season to great acclaim.
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