Love Sauce

If blood makes you uncomfortable, then this isn’t the play for you.

Oh, wait. Blood makes almost everyone uncomfortable. And that seems to be the whole point of Love Sauce: Blood’s creepy, so here’s some blood, and… scene. The play draws on a slew of camp/horror tropes—a dilapidated bayou hotel, a menacing, laconic local—but doesn’t take them anywhere you couldn’t go with, say, Saw III. It successfully provokes revulsion and the occasional gasp, but unfortunately, not much thought.

It’s a bummer the script is such a piece of roadkill, as Evans’s cast seems perfectly capable of doing more, had it been given more. Trey Maclin, as the Bearded Man, makes every scene he’s in watchable; his menacing local is a hypnotic mix of disturbing and charming as hell.

For all its faults, some of Love Sauce’s smaller moments work well. When an out-of-town visitor refuses—or attempts to refuse—the Bearded Man’s offer to buy a round of beers, it turns into an ominous battle of wills. Everyone’s had the argument about who “owes” whom a beer, and Tsarov digs into that interaction to find the grain of egoism and control contained within. And Mike Driscoll contributes a couple of nice pieces of effective sound design: The noise the hotel-room AC unit makes when it turns on is delectably primal, and the sound of a mosquito in the visiting couple’s hotel room at the end of the play is perhaps the most annoying thing we’ve ever heard. If only we hadn’t been so annoyed already.