Love triangle with just one side in view

That other woman — Lashonda — should know. Her eight-year affair with Maurice has been enabled by Constance’s unshakable trust in marriage. But now Lashonda has issued an ultimatum: “I can’t settle for half a man no more.”

Not that you get to hear Lashonda speak. Chisa Hutchinson’s “Proof of Love,” which opened at the Minetta Lane Theater on Tuesday night, is a monologue. And though the monologue is delivered well by Brenda Pressley as Constance, the circumstances that make it one are notably contrived.

Having crashed his car on the way to deliver his response to Lashonda, Maurice is mute. The only sounds coming from behind the curtain in the private ICU room where the play is set are the sucking and whooshing of his ventilator. He is not expected to emerge from his coma.

Lashonda isn’t talking, either. Rather, she is represented by a series of posts, texts and DMs on Maurice’s phone. Constance, who has craftily figured out how to access it, reads the messages aloud, with tart emphasis on grammatical errors. Sifting anxiously through the “paltry evidence” to determine what her husband intended, she nevertheless takes time to enjoy Lashonda’s misspelling of “you’re” as “your.”

If it seems perverse that Hutchinson has chosen to draw a triangle with only one side in view, note that “Proof of Love” was commissioned and produced by Audible, the audio content division of Amazon, in association with New York Theater Workshop. The mandate of Audible’s $5 million emerging playwright program, of which “Proof of Love” is the first offspring, is to create one- or two-person dramas “driven by language and voice.”

Hutchinson, whose work is seen frequently on New York stages, has taken that mandate to heart. All those beeps, susurrations and dings, for instance: You can imagine how effective they will be when Audible records “Proof of Love” for release as an audio play. (The excellent sound design is by Justin Ellington.)

And Hutchinson has been smart in choosing as her sole character a woman so fixated on others. Pressley is withering as she code-switches between the inflections of her own upbringing — “the Jack and Jill, cotillion-attending, Talented Tenth types” — and those of “hood black folks” who name their children Lashonda.

The insult cuts two ways, though. Constance and Maurice’s daughter, Madison, believing she was “whitewashed” at baptism with that name, has started calling herself Sonny and telling Constance to “decolonialize” her brain.

But Constance’s sense of herself as elite is not something she can unlearn; it runs deeper than mere style, which itself runs pretty deep. Her tasteful coral sweater set and gray slacks (by Jen Caprio) say it all.

And why should she change, anyway? “You would think that in one of those Africana Studies classes at Howard,” she says bitterly of Sonny, “they might’ve taught her that there is, in fact, more than one way to be black.”

The point of “Proof of Love” is to turn the tables. Now that Maurice, who grew up poor, has been caught consorting with the likes of Lashonda, it’s Constance who must seriously explore what condescension, racial or otherwise, has done to her — and to the ghost of her 32-year marriage.

That’s a fascinating and fresh theme, worth even the contrivance it takes to establish. And it does provide Pressley — who recently appeared in Hutchison’s play “Surely Goodness and Mercy” — a rich opportunity to explore a complex, loquacious, if emotionally stifled, character. Originally known for her bravura singing, she makes the most of it.

“Proof of Love” also feels stifled. The prioritizing of sound for Audible leaves the stage version visually wan. (The pastel hospital set is by Alexis Distler.) Given the relentless speaking, I wondered whether the experience might have been heightened, in the Beckett manner, by minimizing rather than exploiting the naturalistic distractions.

Hutchinson has further hobbled herself by choosing a structure that starves “Proof of Love” of live conflict. The director, Jade King Carroll, has done what she can to shape the script’s graceful paragraphs into a simulation of action. But her effort is undermined, just before the end of the 75-minute play, when fireworks finally start exploding that could have been lit anytime.

That may matter less in podcast form; there’s something philosophical about the abstract space of pure sound that may prove the play more pungent. (Its title comes from the saying “There is no love; only proof of love.”) As it stands, in the more literal space of the theater, it has the pleasantly free-form if slightly baggy contours of a dream or divagation.

Ultimately, though, I didn’t believe that a woman facing her husband’s death, and with it the first wobbles of her own self-assurance, would have the time or inclination to soliloquize — however daunting her diction.

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Production Notes:

“Proof of Love”

Tickets: Through June 16 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; 800-982-2787, proofoflovetheplay.com.

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

Credits: By Chisa Hutchinson; directed by Jade King Carroll; sets by Alexis Distler; costumes by Jen Caprio; lighting by Mary Louise Geiger; sound by Justin Ellington; production stage manager, Donald Fried; production management, SenovvA; company manager, Jonathan Whitton; general management, Baseline Theatrical. Presented by Audible in association with New York Theater Workshop.

Cast: Brenda Pressley.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.