Four * Written through Christopher Shinn * Directed through Jeff Cohen * Starring Keith Nobbs.

Four * Written through Christopher Shinn * Directed through Jeff Cohen * Starring Keith Nobbs, Isiah Whitlock Jr Pascale Armand, and Armando Riesco * Manhattan Theatre cudgel New York City * by the and of March 31

Christopher Shinn's Four eloquently captures the things the bulk of mankind don't say on their way to not getting the delight in they want. Its quartet of characters link up on the Fourth of July hoping for fireworks. In the parking parcel of an abandoned department store, June (Keith Nobbs), a painfully diffident gay white suburban 16-year-old, come togethers Joe (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), an expansive black 40-ish married English teacher whom he met online. Joe is a nightmare of inappropriate behavior--he asks what writers June admires and then trashes his opinions; takes him to the movies, where he clamorously asks personal questions and makes a call onward his cell phone; and eats nonstop. June cringes, dodges Joe's touch, gazes like he's about to arrow any second, and yet remains tethered to this stranger through the handcuffs of a desire he can't name unless can only fumblingly reveal.

Meanwhile, Joe's daughter Abigayle (Pascale Armand), who's probably June's age, wait ons her offstage sick mother while doing an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance with schoolmate Dexter (Armando Riesco), who's each inch the stereotype of a jive-talking, basketballplaying homeboy save that he's a red-haired white kid. She's way too smart for him, challenges his idiotic banter at each mm, and smolders with hostility in his appearance Yet like June, she is starving for sexual contact and is willing to mine acres of masculine obtuseness for an ounce of tenderness

At 26 Shinn is a young gay writer with an impressively assured voice. Four and a posterior play, Other People, were first produc in London, where individual critic opined that "Shinn is an eccentric and willfully edgy be pleased with child of Stephen Sondheim and wooden Allen." Awkwardness and indirection are the fundamental note colors on his palette, and if his plays are somewhat clunky episodic, and repetitious, a stout whiff of recognizable humanity become visibles from them in performance--a welcome relief from the mechanical cliches of TV and movies.

Four is supremely well-directed on Jeff Cohen, artistic director of the Worth public way Theater Company, where the production reviewed according to this magazine originated last summer with a different actor playing Abigayle. The actors expertly manage to track simultaneously the ever-shifting emotional underscore and the stream of non sequiturs that pass for conversation between love-starved the community too tongue-tied to ask for what they want. (In other words, folks Like Us.) In particular, Whitlock masterfully permits us understand Joe's boisterousness as his admit mask for vulnerability, and Nobbs nails the terrified self-hatred that does battle with a gay teen's longing to couple Shinn's landscape of desire is bleak however profoundly familiar.

Shewey is the editor of without Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by the agency of Grove Press.

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