A series of existential eye-blinks tells the tale of Wallace's trouble with women and adolescent anguish. Its surface air of Olympian detachment and a light satiric touch belie its underlying tenderness and compassion. Under maestro Michael Woolson's masterful baton, playwright Jonathan Mark Sherman's revelatory coming-of-age scenes become a sonata of 21 movements. (Michael Rubino's fine original music provides grace notes.) As soloist, 16-year-old Josh Zuckerman performs like the virtuoso he is, backed up by a sextet of versatile and talented women, instrumentalists with variations on the theme. This is one of those fortunate circumstances in which play and everyone concerned with it seem made for each other.
Zuckerman is beautifully believable as an ebullient 6-year-old who heads off to school one morning and returns to find his beloved mother lying dead by her own hand, sprawled on the kitchen floor. Why? We don't know. That's another story. This story is about the shock that convinces Wallace's young psyche that women desert you when you need them most. He pleads with his impassive, imperturbable psychiatrist, played by lovely red-haired Avery Clyde who also, significantly, plays his mother. She responds to Wallace's urgent "Give me some advice! Something!" with sphinx-like silence and a maddening Mona Lisa smile. No help at all.
A couple of apple-cheeked classmates with schoolgirl crushes on Wallace are enacted by Alexandra Westmore, who woos him shyly, then repels him rudely for responding "too fast." As an only slightly older girl who deflowers young Wallace, Nikki Winston slithers, undulates, sucks provocatively on a lollipop, is "totally awesome" and simply too adept at the art of seduction to be believable--we hope. Sloe-eyed Russian beauty Mila Kunis is Wallace's true love as teenage Nina, whose great eloquent eyes focus intently on his face and every word. Nina, too, leaves in anger. But she comes back.
The only woman who never leaves him is good old Grandma, an audience favorite as played wise, strong, and funny by Barbara Gruen. Everyone loves Grandma. And everyone loves Zuckerman--how could they not? He gives a marvelous performance, with his mobile face expressing what words can't.
Paul Lohr's lights, Marco Morante's costumes, the uncredited all-purpose set, reflect this intermissionless play's occasional forays into absurdism and fantasy.