THE ONE WHO LOVES YOU SO

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke

CAST I Brandon Ingram, Benjamin Aluwihare

LIGHTING I Ryan Holsinger

SET I Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke and Thilini Perera

“Abrazen boundary breaker…an outright attack on Sri Lanka’s conservatism,”
— The Sunday Observer

“Bold, fearless and unapologetic . . . Not only beautiful and painful, it [is] necessary.”
— Ceylon Today

“Its power and voice lingered — the dialogue so charged with meaning, so cleverly constructed to toe the line between social criticism and the playful language of attraction . . . the play felt as subversive as [it] felt real.”
— Kajal Magazine

“A hilarious yet heartbreaking exploration of romance in the city for the disenfranchised”
— The Morning

A regular Friday night finds a wealthy trust-fund Colombo native on a gay dating app trying to find someone for a few hours. In walks a British expat, looking for a few moments of pleasure and not much else. What is supposed to be just a run-of-the-mill one-night experience becomes something quite different.

Over two one-day encounters, mostly confined to a crummy one-bedroom apartment, the two men make love, tell stories, inebriate and commiserate, and in the process share their lives with each other. As the pair tangle between lovemaking and connection, sex and sexuality, love and lust, 'The One Who Loves You So' grapples with the complexities of short-term intimacy, and asks what becomes of love when it has no recourse to future illusions.

The One Who Loves You So is a candid and honest love story; a play about our universal struggle for connection.