Michael Zegen and Heléne Yorke Answer Real Hinge Prompts for Off-Broadway's Strategic Love Play: 'It’s Embarrassing'

Michael Zegen and Heléne Yorke know that modern dating is hard. 

Although they’re both in long-term relationships, Yorke and Zegen both remember the occasionally dark days of singlehood and the tiring ritual of meeting strangers night after night in Miriam Battye’s Strategic Love Play, which is now playing Off-Broadway through Dec. 7 at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre. 

“It felt like she [Battye] was speaking as me at that time in my life ... I just felt excited to do that onstage and in front of people because I think it's incredibly validating,” Yorke, of The Other Two fame, tells PEOPLE of her character’s bold honesty and intense desire for a long-term partnership. “I grew up obsessed with Jane Austen. I know Miriam did as well. And the rom-coms, too, for millennial youth were like you are not complete until you meet said person. And I certainly fell into a camp that believed I was incomplete until I found that magic link to my life.”

Zegen, known for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , plays Man and Yorke plays Woman in the inventive 75-minute play that follows the pair on a date after they matched on an app.

The play, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2023, is rife with awkward laughs and poignant jokes while offering a sobering take on how new generations are defining the purpose of partnership. Written by Succession story editor Battye, Strategic Love Play hones in on why dating is so “mortifying” as Woman says near the end of the show and why, as the character adds, “commitment is so brave.” 

Yorke and Zegen, who met during a Vogue photoshoot for the 2016 Tony Awards, both connected with their characters who are sitting in the middle of what can feel like a hopeless dating scene. The play speaks to a trend in culture too: Forbes’ 2023 Health Survey found that the No. 1 place for singles to meet each other was online. 

Despite the trend, Zegen, 45, says he was “lucky” and didn’t have to deal much with dating apps before settling down with Broadway star Jennifer Damiano. Yorke, 39, had more experience with online dating but recognizes how much has changed on the apps since her 2021 wedding to her husband Bary Dunn, with whom she now shares two sons.

In their only three weeks of rehearsal for Strategic Love Play, Zegen and Yorke went on Hinge and were pretty shocked by what they found. “On our first day of rehearsal, we saw what they're [dating apps] like now and they're not even recognizable. It's so in depth and you have to answer questions and it's embarrassing,” Zegen says. 

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To fully understand the experience, despite its potential to be cringey, the actors picked three question prompts from Hinge and answered them as their characters. “What's your secret fear? What's your secret talent? I mean these were real questions that we saw,” Zegen says. 

“There's like hundreds of questions and they’re like pick three,” Yorke adds. “You're having to define yourself in this two-dimensional way as opposed to meeting in person, which is an inherently three- dimensional experience. And I think looking at potential mates flattened like that makes it especially hard.”

By the end of Strategic Love Play, Man and Woman share their demands for the potential relationship ahead and try to “broker” a partnership without much of the necessary chemistry or spark, as Zegen describes it. When asked what demands they would or have made in their own relationships, the actors say their needs are quite simple. 

“I'm a big acts of service girly,” Yorke says. “I just need you to do s--- for me.” Adding of her husband, who Yorke describes as “the hottest person I've ever seen in my life,” the actress says, “I woke up next to him after having a baby and I was like, what a f------ joke that I could have done this with any other person.”

For his part, Zegen says, “[Jennifer] is big on words of affirmation. I think I'm more of a gifts-giving kind of person.”

While Zegen and Yorke have both found lasting love, they also felt called to do Strategic Love Play for how the show speaks to the universal experience of searching for care and companionship. Despite the occasional hopelessness, Yorke says it’s important to enjoy being single as much as possible. 

“I specifically remember late in my single life, I was sitting in my apartment and I finally had a moment of peace and love for it,” she says. “I was like, I need to enjoy this because I know a day will come where I'll never be alone ever again. And now I'm forgetting to press go on Zoom calls because of screaming kids," she adds with a laugh.

Tickets for Strategic Love Play are now on sale.