Playwrights: Graham Brown, Nathan Faudree and Lisa Roth. At: trip. At Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: 800-838-3006 or www.tripnyc.org; $20. Runs through: March 15
4PLAY: Sex in a Series is a comic dating drama that starts out unconventionally with an intriguing play-within-a-play structure, but ultimately it doesn't live up to its promise of being something truly different. This is disappointing, since 4PLAY has plenty of enjoyable witty dialogue and amusing performances before it fizzles by the tidy end.
The production originally debuted in 2004 with the New York-based company trip., which returns to Chicago with one of its signature works. From the start, 4PLAY defies expectations since the audience is invited to stand and mull around the largely bare Den Theater studio space, or to scramble to find a perch on a number of surrounding multi-level platforms. The show also begins in a very fragmentary way with its choppy text, which introduces a number of the sexually fluid and mostly unnamed New Yorker characters.
4PLAY centers around a nervy playwright/director ( Graham Brown ) who becomes enamored of a hip auditioning actress ( Cyra K. Polizzi ) who becomes his inspirational leading lady on the play he's constructing. The actress shares a three-room apartment with a longtime friend ( Rosa SanMarchi ), and she gradually becomes enamored of their new lesbian roommate played by Erin O'Brien.
But things get complicated when the actress' bisexual younger sister ( Tamara Lynn Chambers ) visits town, and when an earlier drunken gay fling between the playwright/director and the new beau ( Jason M. Hammond ) of his gay best friend ( Joel Behne ) is uncovered during that tired truth-revealing plot device of a drinking game.
4PLAY is at its best when it shows its young characters nervously and daringly entering into new relationships, negotiating around notions of couple-hood, compatibility and sexuality. One also wishes that the play-within-a-play structure was exploited a bit more, since it provides Becca Savoy ( as the stage manager ) and Clare Cooney ( as another auditioning actress ) plenty of amusing asides full of snark and sarcasm.
Directed by writer/actor Brown, 4PLAY largely works despite its lack of sets and the free-flowing staging that often features actors observing scenes that their characters are not technically supposed to be included in. And though there is plenty of smooching ( both of the straight and gay variety ), I'm not so sure that warrants the late-night start time of 10 p.m. for 4PLAY.
The production entertains the most when it aims for witty sitcom banter and romantic situations. Yet you can't shake how it doesn't fully live up to its artistic potential in terms of its initially daring structure.
