Microsoft’s Text to Speech Voice read’s Mona Pirnot’s script aloud (scored with sequences of punctuation to create pauses and silences) as the playwright sits with her back to the audience at a small desk adorned by her laptop and a small lamp. Pirnot’s non-fictional narrative is the personal yet “Everyman” story of loneliness, love, loss, death, bereavement, acceptance, confession, forgiveness, and redemption.

This matrix of feelings from the human psyche emerges from Pirnot’s extended grappling with her sister’s prolonged time on life support as well as Pirnot’s pervasive and unrelenting thoughts about her playwright husband’s and her own eventual death and burial.

Interspersed with the Microsoft’s Text to Speech Voice, Pirnot’s songs, replete with stunning tropes and melodies, counterpoint and complement the text. There are five of them as there are five sections of storytelling.

These are Mona Pirnot’s songs written for herself, for her sister, and for her husband. She delivers them softly and quietly. One must lean in to hear the words of those songs if one wants to own them and if one truly wants to empathize with the loneliness, love, loss, death, bereavement, acceptance, confession, forgiveness, and redemption they so successfully express.

Pirnot’s private and often unspeakable grappling with life “travels” from her family home in Florida, to New York, to Los Angeles, then back to New York. She chooses to perform with her back to the audience because she wants the narrative to be the audience’s narrative. Additionally, much of the narrative is private, reflective, and deeply authentic. The audience members spend the sixty-five minutes in complete silence, often leaning forward not so much to hear better, but to confirm that they are hearing what they think they are hearing. This is a moving and spiritual experience rarely found on the stage. It is a new way of storytelling that challenges old norms and expectations.

Mimi Lien’s sparse yet expansive scenic design, Enver Chakartash’s simple and effective costume design, Oona Curley’s almost imperceptible light-to-dark lighting design, and Mikhail Fiksel and Noel Nichols’s sound design enhance the text-to-speech narration and the vocals in a compelling and flawless manner.

Deftly directed by Pirnot’s husband Lucas Hnath, “I Love You So Much I Could Die” urges the audience members not to forget to “take care of ourselves.” This recurring mantra is perhaps best understood in the final words in the play. “When I die/ Bury half my bones in the backyard of my home/ and the other half in that place I never got to go/ I know/ You’ll do to me as I would do to you.”