purple banner read, “Class of 2023.” According to the assistant director, this is a play about love and its tribulations in “the beautiful thing we call life.”

The curtain drew to reveal a lavishly dressed crew dancing in tandem to Some Nights; the stage, two feet away from the nearest row of spectators, thrummed. The crowd ebbed away. A casket stood in the middle of the stage, and the show began with an animated, condescending corpse remarking on the drinking habits of its companions. A production of The Colony, Your Ex Lover is Dead, staged recently on four consecutive nights, sought to present snapshots of young love through a group of recent philosophy-major graduates.

The play mainly revolves around three upper-class girls: Neha, Alia, and Zaara and the ideals of love they chase. Neha and Zaid are your typical college sweetheart couple, Neha looking for stability and commitment and Zaid looking to the horizons of California for his dream job. Alia has an on-and-off relationship with her cousin, Uzair. Zaara is engaged — not married, as she takes special care to point out — to Rehan.

The characters flit towards each other, gazing longingly yet restrained by their past or societal restraints. The dance becams a fluid, effective metaphor for attraction: fiery, heated salsa steps representing lust taking over, delicate slow-dancing back and forth on centre stage becoming an emotional connection; and haphazard, charged whirling showing the intensity of suppressed attraction. Dance was the vehicle through which the characters and their desires were revealed. While dialogue and plot failed the show in some places, the choreography remained electric and synchronised.

Your Ex Lover is Dead presented love through the eyes of the young, wealthy and privileged. At the heart of the story were Neha and Zaid, torn apart because of changing goals in the gaping face of the future. While their wealthier counterparts (Zaara and Rehan) rode off into the sunset, Zaid and Neha struggled to stay together. The play begot an important question: is physical distance as much of a hurdle to young love in the 21^st Century as it was in the 20th? The answer suggested by the play was ominous. Love could easily become a privilege, or a commodity to show off. Just as easily, it could shackle you to the ground.

Where the play succeeded was in portraying love with respect to the modern-day ideals and expectations that have flooded the general consciousness. A layman fixed the lights on the stage, on Zaara’s big day, seconds before Rehan came floating in, with Love Story by Taylor Swift on his lips. Marriage, the ultimate symbol of love in another character’s eyes, became a jarring, garish caricature as the guests first danced to a song about star-struck lovers and then bopped to samba music (the latest trend in lavish weddings).

The play begets an important question: is physical distance as much of a hurdle to young love in the 21st Century as it was in the 20th? The answer suggested by the play is ominous.

ne plotline, rather stupefying, was regarding Zaid’s death, or after-death. In one of the play’s most haunting visuals, white haze surrounded the stage and diffused into the audience as Zaid’s body was surrounded by apparitions of angels covered in ghostly netting. The unsettling effect, however successful, did not justify the outlandish supernatural implications of Zaid return, only for Neha’s eyes.

Izrael, played by Hashim Ali, the mastermind behind the schemes, was natural and forceful in his expression, yet retained an air of condescension that intrigued the audience.

Next to graduation parties, bumble-scrolling and salsa dances, the concept of barzakh (purgatory) became a farce. Insidious supernatural forces also ruined some of the few tactfully placed and well-written dialogues in the play. Pleading helplessly, Zaid, a bizarre phantom, repeatedly called out to Neha, “Mein agar chala gaya tou wapis nahin aoon ga.”

The emotional, Romeo-and-Juliet-esque ending also fell flat. Neha and Uzair, as souls, were separated by an immovable laser wall, doomed to stay apart — a scene that would engender pity and sadness if the audience weren’t wondering about the practicality of laser walls for souls.

Lighting proved an important technique on account of the play’s multiple themes, as shades and colours were used to betray the characters’ true feelings. Blue washed over characters as they huddled under an umbrella against the storm; purple bled into pink as happiness turned to ashes; Wajeeha Wasti’s wistful Neha turned on a small lamp before staring at memories of her relationship, bathed in natural, yellow light as the audience watched with her.

For the target audience (the young and artistically inclined), this distinctive use of lighting, combined with the director’s preference for Taylor Swift’s music, showed a resemblance to the house in the Lover music video — fitting for a play trying to compartmentalise various shades of young love.

Even as the visuals engaged the audience, the play was convoluted by far too many obvious puns. During the first fifteen minutes of the play, the dialogue seemed forced and littered with beer and bumble jokes, the most painful of which was a drunk Alia wrapped in a Pakistani flag calling out the bourgeoisie.

Generalisations and monologues seemed jarring between loosely related dances. The contrived beginning led to a lack of effective characterization. It was hard as a result to care about the self-obsessed characters and their love lives.

Despite its flaws, Your Ex Lover is Dead proved an enjoyable and suspenseful watch. There is a dearth of realistic media centred on relationship problems that arise due to the changing worldviews of the youth. In his brief speech, the director, Saad Sheikh, pointed out, “Art is the way forward.” We agree.

The writer is an interdisciplinary student of literature and sciences at Lahore College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at fajr.rauf5@gmail com