The 1812 Production offering at Plays & Players is about suburban parents on the first day of school when they're off work and their children are away. The sex gambits are smutty, the characters shallow and boring.
An overlong skit about parents trying their hand at swinging
Same time, next year. Remember that 1978 movie about two people who met for sex once a year, every year, unbeknownst to their spouses?
Not only was it funny - really, really funny - but it was also moving and wry, because the two people were interesting, and their relationship was textured and complicated. Unlike this sex farce.
The First Day of School, opening 1812 Productions' new season at Plays & Players, is based on the same premise: Suburban parents decide to take advantage of the first day of school when they've all taken off from work and their children are out of the house. Carpe diem. Every year.
David (Pete Pryor, who also directed) and his wife, Susan (Karen Peakes), compare notes about their kids' new teachers (nobody would ever guess that they're married to each other from the opening conversation) and then try to decide what to do with this rare bit of free time: Go to a movie? Look at dryers? Have sex with other people? Sounds good.
So they choose other parents who are both near at hand and similarly free; Susan asks Peter (Chris Faith - a standout even among these talented comic actors) while David first asks Kim (Susan Riley Stevens) and then, thinking he has been refused, moves on to Alice (Jennifer Childs).
The description in the news release describes the play - an overlong skit, really - as "a hilarious game of truth or consequences." Puzzling, given that there is neither a single truth nor a single consequence (nor, for that matter, any hilarity).
It continues with: "Each of the show's characters tries desperately to break free of the doldrums of suburbia," but these profoundly shallow and boring people seem quite content with their DVDs of their offsprings' softball games and their delight in the kindergarten teacher's storytelling abilities.
Playwright Billy Aronson (one of those who gave the world Beavis and Butt-head) seems to think sex is smutty and worth only sniggers, which reduces this cast of actors - all of whom have superb comic timing - to trotting out all the stock orgasmic cliches and playing to the teenage crowd (in the theater?). This should make it funny when the actual teenagers (Eileen Cella and Michael Tomasetti) turn up, but it doesn't.
Cute is about the best you could say for this show - terminally cute.
The First Day of School
Presented by 1812 Productions at Plays & Players, 17th and Delancey Streets. Through Oct. 25. Tickets: $20-$35. Information: 215-592-9560 or www.1812productions.org.
