Theatre in Review: My First Ex-Husband (MMAC Theatre)

	Joy Behar, Adrienne C. Moore, Tovah Feldshuh, Susie Essman. Photo: Design Contact

This is the season of Ring Binder Theatre, with rotating casts reading from scripts rather than learning lines and blocking. It's an easy way of getting big-name actors to make short-term commitments, bringing in fresh cadres of fans every couple of weeks. Pen Pals, a girls'-night-out entertainment about lifetime female friends, nabbed Nancy McKeon, Sharon Lawrence, Nia Vardalos, and Kate Burton. All In: Comedy About Love, currently printing money on Broadway, has a come-and-go lineup that includes John Mulaney, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hank Azaria, Aidy Bryant, and Chloe Fineman, reading Simon Rich humor pieces from The New Yorker. Jimmy Fallon's brief run sent the box office into the stratosphere.

Now comes My First Ex-Husband, a kvetch-a-rama about the awfulness of men. Joy Behar, the evening's author and currently a cast member, notes the staggering fact that roughly fifty percent of marriages in the US will end in divorce. She decided to find out why, logging numerous interviews with women about their disastrous first trips down the aisle. (She tried talking to men, she says, but they usually summed up their experiences in one short sentence; "She was crazy." Someone else will have to get their side of the story.)

I'm not saying that Behar didn't do her research, but the testimonies on display sound an awful lot like...Joy Behar. One ex-wife describes her husband's sexual performance as "a little like Billy the Kid: quick on the trigger." How cheap was he? "He used Entenmann's pie plates for hub caps!" Their upstate country house "was just like Grey Gardens...just not as upscale." Nobody says, "Take my husband -- please!" But it's a close call.

The jokes are meant to lighten what is otherwise a parade of miseries. There's the woman who found tapes of her husband's therapy sessions, with him complaining she was fat and couldn't keep up. ("Show me a man who likes a plump woman, and I'll show you a foreigner," she snaps.) There's the loser who tells his pregnant spouse, "I love you so much. Can I please have sex on the side?" Uxoriousness gets no respect, however, certainly not the man who wants to have marital sex every night. ("Doesn't he crave a new vagina?" his exhausted wife complains.) Some material is bizarrely retro, especially one woman's account of discovering her husband's secret penchant for cross-dressing: "He said that he wanted to look classy and feminine. But it's hard to look feminine when you actually look like Sylvester Stallone in a cocktail dress." This isn't the only hint that the show is pitched at a certain demographic; for example, Behar gets a big laugh saying, "The only conversation I ever had with Frank was whether we should go on vacation to Mt. Airy Lodge or The Villa Roma!" If those two resorts are unfamiliar, you have no business being at My First Ex-Husband.

The current cast performs their task with gusto. Susie Essman complains like nobody's business and Behar has fun with the story of a mob wife who, while hubby is up the river, discovers that women make better lovers. Adrienne C. Moore has the weakest material in general but gets one of the evening's most satisfying laughs as a successful actress who, confronting her cheating husband's current paramour, is entirely disarmed when the young lady gushes, "I'm such a fan!" She ends up handing over a signed eight-by-ten photo.

It falls to Tovah Feldshuh, one of the greatest actresses around, to mop up with the story of an adolescent Orthodox social worker whose arranged marriage is an unadulterated calamity, especially when the couple's sexual difficulties become common knowledge in the community. What happens next will be familiar to anyone who has seen the Netflix series Unorthodox but Feldshuh has the audience hanging on every word. You must admire how she causes a hush to fall over the room with the simple statement, "And then my son was born." (For the record, upcoming casts will include Judy Gold, Susan Lucci, Tonya Pink ns, Cathy Moriarty, Veanne Cox, and Jackie Hoffman.)

Still, listening to these tales of woe, one can't help wondering: What were these couples talking about when dating? Why did nobody attempt the slightest due diligence before making lifetime commitments? Interestingly, love rarely seems to come into it; the ladies often cite the men's good looks or apparent fiscal security as their chief reasons for getting hitched. Intended as an evening of empathetic humor, My First Ex-Husband is often depressing to contemplate.

Still, at the performance I attended, each story got an appreciative response from an audience consisting almost entirely of middle-aged or older women, many of whom possibly know the territory being explored here. Randal Myler's production is slick enough to deliver the expected laughs to the audience that craves them. (The credits include projection design by Christopher Ash and costume consultation by Olivera Gajic; the firm Design Contact is listed as theatrical design consultant.) Note to any man reading this: If your wife/girlfriend/partner wants to see My First Ex-Husband, drop her off and do something else. After the show, take her for drinks and dinner. Above all, treat her nicely. You don't want to end up as a case history. --David Barbour