Elle Sullivan and Ben Kleymeyer in A Breakup Is Swift. (Photo courtesy of Capital Fringe)

Reminds us of: A very compelling case for ghosting.

Flop, Fine or Fringe-tasic? Fringe-tastic.

Artist and director Clint Bagwell says that the script for A Breakup Is Swift is a real breakup conversation between a couple that dated for “three intense weeks,” sent to him by one of the participants in the talk. “Enjoy the awkwardness,” Bagwell advises in an introduction. And oh, did I ever.

Each performance of the show features a different pairing of actors switching up the roles, so you could catch a same-sex couple, or a straight couple where a woman does the heartbreaking, or vice versa. The version I saw had Elle Sullivan as Cameron, breaking up with Dale (Ben Kleymeyer). Cameron tells Dale she wants to end it, expecting the conversation to be short, but he isn’t ready to call it quits yet. “I’m just trying to make sense of it,” he says. “Tell me about the incompatibilities.”

What follows is a brutal—and brutally funny—back-and-forth. He wants her to accept her culpability, whereas she wants to preserve her sense of herself as a kind person. It makes for riveting theater because so much of relationships are performance anyway, whether to one another, our partners, or the other people in our lives. As the great Joni Mitchell says, “Love is a story told to our friends.” I can’t wait for more of A Breakup Is Swift, to hear the story told in a new, yet achingly familiar, way.

A Breakup Is Swift is playing at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library: A3 on Tuesday July 19 at 7:15 p.m., Saturday July 23 at 4:15 p.m., and Sunday July 24 at 2 p.m.

See here for more of DCist’s Capital Fringe 2016 reviews.