Baby hunger.(two Broadway plays)

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 (Robert Sella)--he bends every which way in the sexuality sweepstakes--still has a jones for Jason (Malcolm Gets), an alcoholic boyfriend he kicked out some months ago. They meet up at a local bar on his birthday, and one of the many faltering admissions they make, in the static of Donaghy's carefully wrought exchange, concerns their longing to rear a child together--a project that would jump-start internal change in both men, bind them to each other, and build hope into an otherwise bleak emotional landscape. "Someone to raise better than we were," Reed says. "For our, um, extra love." The birthday celebration then moves to his friend Bev's grand new duplex, where she lives with her Sugar Mommy, the pert, well-organized, and possessive Shelly (Carrie Preston). Reed and Bev (Nadia Dajani) once had a roll in the hay, and he donated his sperm for her--although his was not the sperm used to create Georgie, the four-year-old boy whom Bev and Shelly are rearing now. In the middle of the party's bourgeois flimflammery ("There's a sconce I wanted to show you"), Bev pops an unexpected question to Reed. "We want you to live with us," she says. "He needs a father."

So when Reed reunites with Jason, who is not only back in his life but back on the sauce, he is caught on a kind of sexual seesaw, bouncing between male model and role model, between caring for a big baby and caring for a little one. In the play, Georgie is always, significantly, offstage. The legalities of sharing the child take on more importance than the actual sharing of time with him, and the problem of being present for Georgie is Reed's undoing in the new menage; when Reed goes away on business, a second gay babysitter, Jeurgen, is hired to pick up the slack. "Then who am I?" Reed asks, feeling marginalized. "We know who you are," Bev counters. "Georgie knows. You're the guy who's always in Boston."

Act II opens with Reed slumped in a folding chair amid sand buckets and beach bags. He casts a cold eye offstage at Georgie and at Jeurgen, with whom he's had a fling, and who has turned out to be a foot fetishist. "God forbid I should get kissed every now and ...