Break Your Heart
Written and Performed by Scot Moore; Directed by Ben Layne
Produced by One T Productions
Part of the 2017 FRIGID New York Festival
Off Off Broadway, Solo Show
Runs through 2.25.17
UNDER St. Marks, 94 St. Marks Place
by Zachary Conner on 2.19.17
Scot Moore in Break Your Heart. Photography by Heidi M. Garrido.
BOTTOM LINE: One man's semi-autobiographical look into how heartbreak is often the best way to learn how to live your most authentic life.
As is the case with many things in life, often it isn’t about the destination—it’s the journey that makes any endeavor truly worthwhile. In his semi-autobiographical solo play Break Your Heart, Scot Moore shows us just that. Specifically, love is that rocky and uncertain road justified in traveling.
Serving as writer, sound designer, and sole actor in the production, Moore begins Heart at the end of the story—falling in love with seemingly the woman of his dreams, and having his heart shattered halfway across the world. We know how the story will end, so it’s important for us as an audience to go back to beginning. Only, not just to the start of his quest for love, but instead back to the basics of love itself. Comically illustrated through a series of projections, quotes, and scientific explanations, Moore demonstrates to the audience how we as humans are hard-wired to love, for better or for worse. While the piece has plenty of potential to veer towards the over-factual and somewhat dry, Moore maintains focus and entertainment by blending data with personal anecdotes that support and prove theories held by love "experts."
Moore is immediately likable and incredibly relatable. Even if not everyone in the audience has experienced the same things as Moore, there’s no doubt we can all recognize and acknowledge some of the most basic ideas he presents to us, in our own love stories. Also helping to add emotional and satisfying punctuation to his narrative are actual video testimonials from people in Moore’s life, giving their own two cents about each topic covered in the production.
Eventually, after moving sequentially through the trials and tribulations of various conquests of love, we return to the moment of the show’s commencement—that one moment of horrifying heartbreak that seems to define Moore’s love life to this day. However, we aren’t meant to reach this point and feel badly for Moore. Instead, it’s proven to us in an incredibly well-written final monologue, accompanied by Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune, that we are meant to see love as a sort of beautiful orchestration only achieved by writing, rewriting, and learning from those "off-key notes" we encounter along the way.
Theatre-goers wanting a deeply personal and inventive look into how having your heart broken can actually benefit a person in the end, should check out Scot Moore’s Break Your Heart.
(Break Your Heart plays at UNDER St. Marks, 94 St. Marks Place, through February 25, 2017. The running time is fifty minutes. Performances are Wed 2/15 at 5:30, Sat 2/18 at 3:50, Sun 2/19 at 12:10, Tue 2/21 at 5:30, Thu 2/23 at 7:10, and Sat 2/25 at 10:30. Tickets are $15, $10 for students/seniors, and are available at FRIGIDNewYork.info.)
Break Your Heart is written and performed by Scot Moore. Directed by Ben Layne.