‘I LOVE YOU … NOT’
7 p.m., RayLynn Theater, Hot Springs. $25.
For a time, Hot Springs neurologist Richard Pellegrino’s business card read: “No nerve too big, no brain too small.” It’s a nugget the doctor reveals in the course of explaining how he came to write “I Love You … Not,” a play that’s being directed by renowned New York acting coach and director Roger Simon and that will likely make its stage debut Off Broadway in the spring or summer, but not before it debuts, as a staged reading, at the RayLynn Theater in downtown Hot Springs on Friday and Saturday.
Pellegrino isn’t giving away specifics about “I Love You…” beyond that it’s “about a psychologist who is blackmailed into falsifying a report on a reality TV producer, who has been fired unjustly.” More broadly, he’ll say that it’s a psychodrama — the characters play mind games with each other. And who better to conjure elaborate mind games than a neurologist? Pellegrino says he’s learned a lot about human nature from interacting with his patients.