NY Review: 'An Evening of Awkward Romance'

"An Evening of Awkward Romance" is an apt title for this 75-minute series of sketches, and the show's two performers offer an attractive symbiosis throughout. Stefan Schick and Wendy Herlich (who also wrote the script) are believably evenly matched in their several portrayals, and they have the good sense to make verbal and visual use of their height difference (she is substantially taller than he). Yet like so many of these sketch programs, this one has its ups and downs.

The most fully realized piece features the pair as side-by-side proof readers who take mutual delight in the more egregious errors in the documents they are editing but are obtuse about taking their friendship outside the office. As a dry cleaner obsessed with a 35-year-old Class A baseball player, Herlich gives new meaning to the phrase "delightfully long-legged" as the woman attempts to seduce the uninterested athlete. As he puts it, backing away, "There's a fine line between having dreams and being deluded." Playing a pair of 11-year-olds on a first soda-shop date (with a parental chaperone seated nearby but out of earshot), Schick and Herlich are astonishingly credible slurping their orange pops and hilariously clueless about sex.

But the bit about a married couple discussing how to rekindle their relationship while she folds the laundry and makes a mental shopping list mostly misfires. Sorting dirty laundry instead of folding clean clothes might make a better metaphor, but there's much more to fix in this sequence. A blind date on which a TCM-obsessed woman talks and acts like the leading ladies of mid-century American movies is promising but needs further development. So does a sketch about a meet-cute couple in a funeral parlor.

The video portions of the program, while they provide scene-changing opportunities for the actors and director Ruthie Levy, are less audience-friendly, especially when they feature characters we also get to see live on stage (chiefly the 11-year-olds). We'd rather wait a few minutes for the real thing than be subjected to these rudimentary time fillers.

Presented by and at the Tank, 151 W. 46th St., NYC. Feb. 11–26. Sat. and Sun., 7 p.m. (800) 838-3006 or www.brownpapertickets.com.