About

Love Fail is an evening-length theater work from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang. Sung by the genre bending Quince Ensemble, Love Fail is a tour de force of storytelling, weaving together snippets of medieval courtly love narratives, short stories by MacArthur Fellowship Award-winning author Lydia Davis, scraps from the libretto of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, and text by Lang himself. Out of these sources, Lang has conjured a single story in which two unnamed lovers meet each other, love each other, and lose each other – not necessarily in that order.

Support

Produced by Beth Morrison Projects. Commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2012 Next Wave Festival, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the John F. Kennedy Center Abe Fortas Memorial Fund, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, Wake Forest University / Secrest Artists Series, and Hancher Performances at the University of Iowa.

Press

“With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little matchgirl passion (one of the mostoriginal and moving scores ofrecent years), Lang, once a post minimalist enfant terrible,has solidified his standing as an American master.”

The New Yorker

“There is no name yet for this kind of music”

The LA Times

“Wagner’s theater, as well as his subject is distilled in Love Fail, which is a work of theater in which the theatrical elements – gently shifting lighting by Jennifer Tipton; subtle soundscapes by Jody Elff; sculptural costumes by Suzanne Bocanegra; video snippets by Jim Findlay that often look like still photographs, until the men and women in them blink – are so subtle that they create an existential question about what constitutes a work of theater.”