Theatre in Review: Playing with Grown Ups (Brits Off Broadway/59E59)

	Daisy Hughes, Alan Cox. Photo: Carol Rosegg

"I find adults fascinating." So says the winsome 17-year-old Stella, who is about to discover the consequences of playing with grown-ups. If only the adults in Hannah Patterson's play were worthy of that fascination. Instead, Playing with Grown Ups is an excellent example of the perils of working in a well-worn dramatic genre; lacking a fresh point of view or novelty value, you risk sending your audience off to naptime. This is one of those plays in which two couples get together for an evening of drinks and ugly truths -- you can trace its provenance all the way back to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- but the result is dreary rather than electrifying.

The battle is joined in the flat of Joanna and Robert, a married couple approaching 40 with all due speed. He is a professor of film at a second-rate university; she works for a publishing company devoted to resurrecting the works of women writers "who've been written out of history." At the moment, however, she is on a year-long maternity leave; many American women would consider this an unimaginable luxury, but the burden of caring for her new baby is driving Joanna mad. She has "a whole shiny year, stretching out in front of me," she says, in a tone that suggests she would be just as happy doing five-to-ten in San Quentin.

Patterson doesn't make this point subtly: When the lights come up, Joanna is in her living room listening to Helen Reddy sing "I Am Woman" at such a level that the sound of her baby crying through the bedroom intercom is thoroughly obscured. Robert appears and remonstrates with her, but it is already clear that Joanna could give a hoot about the little bundle of joy down the hall. "Bring back wet nurses, I say," she adds, and she isn't really joking. In tones of horror, she says, "My god...my hands. They look like my mother's, suddenly." Ignoring Robert's pleas to go easy on the red wine -- she is, after all breastfeeding -- she says, simply, "I feel like I'm nothing, Robert." Even more directly, she says of their child, "I don't think I want her."

Robert, who is truly one of the clueless of the earth, thinks that the best way to cheer up Joanna is to invite their dear friend -- and Robert's colleague -- Jake for dinner and drinks. This last-minute invitation sends Joanna higher than a kite, and matters are not helped when Jake shows up with Stella, his 17-year-old girlfriend. They met when he was giving a lecture about Antonioni, which she attended, having been assigned a paper on Italian cinema. As Jake blithely notes, their relationship isn't illegal. (It's the UK, where the age of consent is 16.)

What follows is a little bit of dinner, plenty of drinks, and as much disillusionment as the traffic will bear. Joanna botches the meals, so takeout pizza is served. Jake has nothing but contempt for his academic career. "It isn't really a proper university," he sniffs. "We just pass the time, make money, and buy stuff." Robert demurs, but his career is stuck in neutral. Having published one book -- its title, Wiping Down the Kitchen Sink: Realism in British Cinema, is one Patterson's wickedest inventions -- he has taken nearly 12 years on the sequel, which remains unfinished. At the same time, both men are aware that looming budget cuts may make them redundant. Stella, for her part, can't understand why she should go to university at all; she simply wants to get on with her life. Meanwhile, Joanna is all but unraveling in front of them.

Playing with Grown Ups founders on two fronts. The dialogue lacks the sting of real wit, which might keep us interested in these people and their mundane, middle-class, middle-years problems. Furthermore, a certain falseness clings to the situation: Joanna's plight is so obvious that even a master of passive-aggression like Robert should be able to grasp what is happening; also, the script never hints at how they ended up at this unpretty pass. Joanna says she never really wanted to have a child, but one doesn't have enough sense of this marriage to understand how a driven, brilliant career woman like Joanna allowed herself to get into this mess. Similarly, the Jake-Stella relationship comes off merely as a playwright's device for stirring up trouble on stage. We're also expected to believe that, 20 years earlier, Jake and Joanna nearly had a romance; this revelation seems to exist mostly so they can take part in an awkward embrace that causes Joanna to accidentally spill breast milk on the disgusted Jake.

There are many other oddities: Jake announces his intention to sleep over with Stella, which cues a delayed, out-of-the-blue conniption fit from Robert. And Stella, who acts in a preternaturally mature manner all night -- "Can't you just act your age for once?" asks a frustrated Joanna -- suddenly reverts to being an awkward adolescent in the last five minutes of the play.

Patterson's point is the notion of women having it all -- career, family, romance -- is really a trap that leads to physical and spiritual exhaustion, but both this premise, and the situation, and characters are all fairly secondhand. Very occasionally Playing with Grown Ups amuses; never does it surprise.

Under Hannah Eidinow's direction, Trudi Jackson is allowed to overplay Joanna's distress to the point where you wonder why someone doesn't call an ambulance. This has the effect of making Mark Rice-Oxley's Robert seem a total dolt. Alan Cox wraps his plummy voice about Jake's many languorous expressions of discontent. And Daisy Hughes is a warm and engaging presence as Stella; Patterson clearly has a solid handle on how young people think and speak.

The set design by Simon Scullion is rather clever, depicting the living room as a kind of black-and-white version of a blueprint, indicating with words where such amenities as the fireplace and window should go. Aside from a few pieces of furniture, the key props are three posters -- for the films Don't Look Now, La Dolce Vita, and Belle de Jour -- the latter one being there so Stella can look at a picture of Catherine Deneuve and wonder who she is. Nicholas Holdrige's lighting, Natalie Pryce's costumes, and Tom Wilson's sound design are all thoroughly professional.

Overall, the despair expressed in Playing with Grown Ups is strictly pro forma; what is lacking is a crucial sense of perspective. Turning 40 and discovering that your dreams aren't coming true can be an upsetting and disillusioning experience; it is not a sentence in the gulag, however. In any case, too many of Patterson's ideas come from the "used" bin, where they have been picked over by many other playwrights.--David Barbour