Erin McGathy: Love You Loudly

Some say falling in love is like falling off a cliff. For Erin McGathy, it’s like sliding face-first down a pit. Ever since she saw the Princess Bride as a little girl and threw herself down a bank of gravel (“as you wiiiiiish…”) she has been obsessed with the grand romantic gesture.

From her first crush on her teacher, she has treated every romance like it’s part of a movie, but she’s the only one who got the script. Every carefully planned spontaneous moment becomes another pebble in the teeth.

Some of her more inventive declarations would border on creepy if she wasn’t so earnest. Instead, she has a habit of almost apologising for being places, as if she’s not wanted. She even makes a big deal out of choosing friendly faces in the audience to offer her support as she goes. But her shy act belies how well-chosen and genuinely funny the stories are.

That said, things take a darker turn when she reaches her marriage to fellow American comedy writer Dan Harmon – her cupid-mania hitting new heights with her doomed wedding.

That’s OK. Love Me Loudly is sentimental without being cuddly, and has bite because it’s honest, not shocking. Even as McGathy recounts her failed relationships, this never becomes a bitter bonfire of the exes like many other Fringe shows. The crux is how the purest and most powerful emotion we feel turns into the most ridiculous when we express it. Love and humiliation are two sides of the same curve, a hole down which we can’t help but fall. This is what we laugh about when we laugh about love.