Baby hunger.(two Broadway plays)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-JUN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Plays can be time bombs that keep exploding in the brain long after the curtain falls. Take Tom Donaghy's sprightly "Boys and Girls" (at the Duke). The title of the play suggests a certain childishness in its characters, and its introductory music--a high-pitched kids' version of "All You Need Is Love"--seconds the motion. The play's short strokes of dialogue and characterization give it a sketchy quality; it is more Ping-Pong than tennis. But Donaghy, a former student of David Mamet's, learned from the Master that "you could do more damage with fewer words," and we are lured, by this surface brightness and by Gerald Gutierrez's deft direction, into a gray world of complication and ambiguity--that of the gender wars, and the subsidiary skirmish over the combustible issue of gay parenting. Under the rumblings of baby hunger in "Boys and Girls," there can be heard a distinctively American--and adolescent--ambition: to have everything all the time.

The play's hero, the lovelorn, nervy, aptly named Reed...

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