A queasy comedy of adultery, the play begins as two 30ish couples — Rachel (Mairin Lee) and Nick (Ben Rappaport), Frank (Gabriel Sloyer) and Molly (Keren Lugo) — meet for kombucha and crudités. The chitchat turns to babies, to religion, to the environment. There are jokes about women buying shoes and Buddhists self-immolating and a long tirade about how no one should ever bring a child into a world flooring it toward catastrophe.
Turns out Rachel is pregnant. Whoops. And the baby might not be Nick’s. Whoops again. In seven should-be brisk scenes, punctuated by projections and titles, the characters fall out of love and into quips.
This is my first ride-along with Williams’ work. For all I know he’s a mensch and a half, but I would hesitate to call him a playwright. Under John Pasquin’s ba-dum-dum direction, this is a show, supertitles aside, that longs to be a sitcom. (Turns out Williams has had a long and distinguished career in sitcoms. So, yeah.) Its dialogue and form don’t seem built for live theater, and maybe its jokes — “Every time I go to a bris, I imagine the end result looks like a calamari ring” — would ring truer with a laugh track. Maybe not: “L.G.B.T.-Q.R.S.T.U.V.W.!”
The characters are loose agglomerations of stereotypes, millennial cartoons: Rachel is a hard-nosed lawyer, Molly a dippy interior designer, Frank a smug finance bro, Nick a health-nut do-gooder. A couple of the actors are miscast. If you’re going to make so many jokes about Frank’s body-fat index, why choose Sloyer, who looks like a catalog model? But the failure to put these people over isn’t on them. (Actually, Rappaport nearly succeeds — a coup.)
Even the cliches aren’t coherent. Williams tells us several times that Molly is a fashionista. (“I couldn’t be Jewish,” she says. “No fashion sense.” Say it with me: Oy.) Then she adds that if she had a boy, she “would love him unconditionally and dress him in adorable designer clothes. Probably Tommy Hilfiger.” (Has Hilfiger ever been on trend?) And Molly dresses in ashram separates that no millennial woman I know would ever leave the house in.
This is the play’s ceiling-high stumbling block: It doesn’t seem as if Williams has ever spoken to people like these characters, except maybe to shout, “Get off my lawn!” Millennial buzzwords pepper the play: Vice, Thinx, that bone broth. But they’re rarely deployed correctly, and the conversation mostly sounds like a boomer’s burlesque of young-adult speech.
“Oh my god,” Rachel says in a moment of crisis. “This can’t be happening. This can’t be real.”
So true.
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“Actually, We’re ______” runs through April 21 at the Cherry Lane Theater, New York City; 866-811-4111, cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.