THEATER REVIEW A Kid Like Jake

We never meet Jake. We meet Jake's mom, Alex, the privileged and fiercely competitive daughter of a likewise privileged, fiercely competitive mother. Alex has suffered two miscarriages since having Jake, rendering her extremely protective of her surviving son. For the first four years of Jake's life, she has indulged his affinity for Disney princesses. However, now that the time has come for Jake to start kindergarten, she fears that his "gender-variant" behavior may reduce his chances of enrollment in a prestigious toddler-school. Oh—and Alex is pregnant again.

This premise could spool out along the lines of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, mocking procreative social climbers who treat their progeny as extensions of their own egos, but playgoers who recall last fall's Downpour ( performed, coincidentally, in the same theater as this About Face production ) might find themselves experiencing deja vu at the spectacle of another affluent WASP mommy going batcrackers under the stress of her maternal responsibilities. Jake's psychotherapist dad, while acknowledging the possibility of hormonal imbalances lying at the source of his wife's erratic perceptions, is patient and supportive. So is Jake's day-care counselor, who goes the extra mile to ensure Jake's successful future, even as she warns Alex that it may not be the one mapped out for him.

Any child encumbered by this many filial duties at so early an age is doomed to stagger under their weight, so it comes as no surprise when Jake grows moody and hostile as he struggles to determine his place in the world outside the nest. As Alex's emotional equilibrium continues to deteriorate, however, leading her to cast blame for Jake's alleged identity crisis on everybody within her purview, we begin to suspect playwright Dan Pearle of pursuing an agenda different than what we initially assumed. Is a scene where Alex imagines that her obstetrician's assistant is a happily grown-up Jake meant to be a dream sequence, or a tip-off that Jake, himself, is a fantasy projection conflating all the infants that Alex was unable to bring full-term?

Director Keira Fromm and a sturdy ensemble of off-loop regulars keep a firm grip on Pearle's increasingly slippery material, imposing a veneer of plausibility on dynamics that strain credulity, but 105 intermissionless minutes are still necessary to cover a slate of talking points geared more toward promoting lively post-show discussions than drawing conclusions or forging resolutions. In the end, the only lesson we take away is the importance of thinking very, very carefully before embarking on the path to parenthood.