Cult of Love. A Review.

A Bourgeois Hell of Our Own Making

In Leslye Headland's "Cult of Love," we witness a spectacle of familial self-destruction – a Christmas Eve family dinner. Like Sartre's iconic play "No Exit," but with red wine and Christmas carols, Headland has crafted a domestic inferno where the torturers are wearing festive sweaters and speaking in passive-aggressive Christian platitudes.

The parallels with Sartre's existentialist masterpiece are impossible to ignore, though the stark metaphysical setting in Sartre’s play is traded for a New England farmhouse decorated like a Pottery Barn catalog. In Sartre’s play, 3 family members die and go to hell, and at first are pleasantly surprised at how he’ll looks like a nice bourgeois living room. But then slowly it dawns on them that they are trapped together in this room for eternity, with no exit. It is the source of Sartre's famous phrase "Hell is other people", a reference to Sartre's ideas about the look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an ob…