All This Intimacy

The current show at Second Stage Uptown plays like a sitcom. All This Intimacy is the story of one man who gets three (yes..three) women pregnant at the same time. Sounds like a sticky situation, huh? Yep - that's about right. This new play comes from playwright, Rajiv Joseph - whose previous show, Huck and Holden, I saw at Cherry Lane Theatre a few months ago. (That was a very different type of show, about a young Indian boy trying to adjust to being a student in America.)

The play starts, and we immediately meet the main character, Ty, whose life seems to be just about perfect. He's just had his first volume of poetry published and it's doing extremely well. Because of this, he's offered a job teaching a class on poetry at Columbia. He's also got a beautiful girlfriend whom he "claims" to love very much. At 30 years old, he seems to have things pretty much in line.

And cut to the drama.... Through a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, we learn about the twisted goings-on of the leading man. Ty begins to have an affair with his next door neighbor - a 40-something married woman with an adopted child. He also begins to fool around with one of his students - all the while still being with his girlfriend. And this is how Ty gets himself into big trouble. Somehow all three women manage to find out about each other and things turn pretty badly in the end of the show. Two of the women end up keeping the children - but Ty never gets to meet them. I personally was happy to see the show with a less than happy ending.

The comic flair of the writing and timing of (most of) the actors seems to work pretty well for this show. I really enjoyed Thomas Sadoski as Ty - thought he had great delivery and was very believable. Again, I can see him being on the next Everybody Loves Raymond or something on CBS - but alas... The women were all three mediocre - and some parts were better than others. My friend Alison seemed to love the girl who played the student - Krysten Ritter - and her credits list her as a character on the WB show, Veronica Mars - so maybe she's used to this type of "TV" style theatre. All in all, it's a cute show that's good fun for a nice summer night - nothing more, nothing less.