Some Notes on Dating During Outbreak at BeBe Theatre

Let’s get this out of the way up top: Some Notes on Dating During Outbreak is not a play about COVID-19.

It’s a show about terrible timing — a first date rudely interrupted by the sudden death of a diseased server — that has itself been the victim of circumstances outside its control. Asheville playwright Travis Lowe wrote the script in 2017, and before director Steven Samuels could stage the work through The Sublime Theatre & Press, an actual pandemic broke out.

Some Notes finally made its debut July 13 at the BeBe Theatre in downtown Asheville, and according to Samuels, the play has been preserved almost entirely in its pre-pandemic form. One quick exchange between the would-be romantics Roald (Alex McDonald Villarreal) and Nova (Lauren Otis) noting that their situation “is nothing like COVID” is all the audience gets to acknowledge the past three years. 

With that provenance in mind, Lowe’s script feels eerily prescient of the challenges the world faced due to the coronavirus. As Nova and Roald are kept from leaving the back room of an upscale restaurant by unseen authorities, they must come to grips with a lack of definitive information and a sense that those in charge have no plan for their rescue. They awkwardly navigate the power dynamics of interacting with service workers, represented here by their waiter, Satie (Olivia Stuller).  

But above all, they struggle with each other and with how their joint isolation pushes them to forge connections and erect boundaries. Lowe’s approach borrows from Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot, both in his tragicomic register and the way his characters build a shared language over time.

Unlike Beckett’s old friends Vladimir and Estragon, however, the pair at the heart of Some Notes have just met. Villarreal’s Roald tries to make the best of the terrible situation and engage his date; Otis’ Nova is hesitant, at first all but paralyzed by fear. Both do an excellent job dwelling in the awkwardness of the moment, drawing the audience into their small-scale drama amid the implied societal breakdown.   

The action never leaves the room, laid out in generically nice white-tablecloth fashion by set and props designer Laura Lowe, but assistant director Rachel McCrain’s lighting cues fragment the scenes to highlight the passage of time. Otis and Villarreal pace themselves very well, such that the evolution of their rapport matches the heightening of Lowe’s dialogue.

The first act of the play bristles with uncertainty, both about the general facts of the outbreak and between the couple, who probe the hints each gives of a dark background. Things turn believably nasty in places as Nova and Roald grow more frustrated (and drink from one of the restaurant’s last bottles of wine).

The second act resolves some of those questions, at least regarding the characters’ pasts. It’s here that the play’s momentum begins to falter a bit: When one of the work’s major themes is how to deal with the unknown, it seems almost too convenient to get clear answers about histories Nova and Roald have only hinted at before. And as the pair tries to work out exactly why they’re being kept in the restaurant, some of their dialogue feels like it’s been lifted from a failed escape room session.

But the back half does give Stuller’s Satie a more prominent role. Her presence as a third wheel helps add new dimension to the questions that concern Roald and Nova; the waiter is both not part of the date and an integral part of the couple’s experience. 

All three are stuck in the horror of lockdown together, much as the world was three years ago. They laugh; they cry; they offer service and companionship to each other — and their relatable responses make it all the more impressive that Lowe didn’t write Some Notes with the pandemic in mind. Second act shortcomings aside, the play has much to say about what it means to share a world in crisis.   

Some Notes on Dating During Outbreak runs through Saturday, July 29, at the BeBe Theatre. For details and tickets, visit bit.ly/snoddo. 

(Photo courtesy of Sublime Theatre & Press)