Review: Intimacy


Laura Esterman and Keith Randolph Smith in Intimacy
(©Monique Carboni)

For a play that features, among other things, masturbation, ejaculations, fellatio, anal sex, suggestions of incest and frottage—look up that last one if you need to—Thomas Bradshaw’s Intimacy is remarkably wholesome.

Indeed, by the time this ribald comedy presented by The New Group reaches its conclusion, all of its characters are in a state of blissful harmony despite the profusion of sexual and racial tensions that have previously threatened to rend them apart.

It concerns three families living near each other in an upscale suburban town. Widower James (Daniel Gerroll) is still grieving for his late wife but finds himself consumed with sexual thoughts despite his stern religiosity. His sex-obsessed teenage son Matthew (Austin Cauldwell), an aspiring filmmaker, voyeuristically spies on Janet (Ella Dershowitz), the sexy girl next door, even while beginning a sexual relationship with Sarah (Dea Julien), the daughter of Fred (David Anzuelo), a contractor who pleasures himself to gay porn. Finally, there are Janet’s parents, bi-racial couple Jerry (Keith Randolph Smith) and Pat (Laura Esterman), whose healthy sex life has apparently inspired their daughter to become a porn actress.

Playwright Bradshaw has repeatedly stated in interviews that he doesn’t consider himself a provocateur, but the assertion seems disingenuous considering this work’s endless representations of sex and bodily functions as exuberantly staged by director Scott Elliott. Full-frontal nudity and graphic sex abounds, and only the most discerning, or close-up, will be able to differentiate the prosthetic penises from the real ones.

When he first learns that his daughter is posing in such magazines as Barely Legal, Jerry is aghast. But he soon finds himself indulging in sexual fantasies about her, even while sarcastically asking, after she comes home from work, “Did you have some nice orgasms?” His sexually liberated wife is far more supportive, arguing that their daughter having sex in front of a camera is simply “a career choice.”

The virginal Sarah won’t allow Matthew to have intercourse with her, but she happily uses his bodily fluids as a medicinal cream for her acne-plagued skin. Meanwhile, he comes to embrace his bi-sexuality after being graphically propositioned by her father.

Resembling nothing so much as a network sitcom if the censors had all been sent packing, the play ultimately centers on Matthew’s deciding to make an all-frottage porn film starring Janet and his father, the latter of whom gleefully sheds his inhibitions after becoming besotted by the comely young woman.

Making the hardly revelatory point that we’re all capable of extreme licentiousness under the right circumstances, the play, for all its graphicness, lacks the anarchic wit that would make it truly thought provoking. It mainly comes across as begging for attention, like a pathetic flasher trying to be caught.

The performers, ranging from such veteran pros as Gerroll, Esterman and Smith to the younger newcomers, are certainly game for anything, shedding their clothes and dignity in strained attempts to induce laughs and gasps. To their credit, they sometimes succeed, but in such moments as when Smith’s harried Jerry takes a relaxing toilet break to the auditory accompaniment of loud farting sounds, it’s hard not to feel sorry for them.

Ultimately, the play is far less than the sum of its, um, parts. Its relative tameness is illustrated when a scene from the notorious porn film Deep Throat is shown on a television monitor. Watching Linda Lovelace perform her trademark sexual act--and it’s impossible not to, despite the live actors onstage-- one is reminded of an earlier time when it was still possible to be genuinely shocked.

Acorn Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200. www.telecharge.com. Through March 8.