About the Play:

Love Alone is a full-length drama by Deborah Salem Smith. After a routine medical procedure goes tragically wrong, a lawsuit ensues and the lives of both the patient's family and the doctor charged with her care are transformed. A lovingly drawn portrait of how we grieve and how we heal.

Love Alone is about what happens to the patient's family and the doctor's family when a routine medical procedure goes tragically awry. When Helen's lesbian partner of twenty years dies unexpectedly in minor surgery, Helen and her daughter want answers. Confused by the hospital's silence around the death, they bring a lawsuit against the doctors. Now Dr. Becca Neal must confront her feelings about losing her patient while she juggles the demands of a lawsuit. Love Alone tracks the fallout in both the patient's and the doctor's homes, as both households navigate uncharted waters of anger, humor, and longing. This powerful story of how we grieve and how we heal speaks to an essential truth: We will all be patients one day.

Love Alone premiered in 2012 at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island and received an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award. The play has been performed in regional repertory, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 women, 2 men

What people say:

"Few plays or movies capture the complex emotional and professional aftermath of a medical error. So often, the characterizations and story lines are as facile as a cartoon, with careless and negligent doctors, irrational and vengeful patients and families, and soulless, ambulance-chasing lawyers. Love Alone…breaks this mold. [This] lucid, deeply nuanced and fearless work pulls no punches as it lays bare the emotions of two families." — New York Times

"First-rate…[a] gleaming gem." — The Boston Globe

"Thought-provoking, well-written, and just darn good theater." — The Providence Journal

"It is real. It is intimate…even as you are reeling from one moving scene, seconds later in the following scene, you'll be smiling. I bit back the tears with laughter." — Rhode Island Monthly

About the Playwright:

Deborah Salem Smith is an American poet and playwright. She is the playwright-in-residence at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island and is a Huntington Theatre Playwriting Fellow.