In Good Parenting or Bad

In Bathsheba Doran’s slender new two-hander, [Parents’ Evening], couple Judy (Julianne Nicholson) and Michael (James Waterston) are struggling to keep their marriage afloat. He’s a work-at-home writer; she’s a lawyer angling to make senior partner, as evidenced by the pile of file folders covering their bed, breaking all rules of Feng Shui. The cracks in their relationship begin to widen when they’re forced to confront the ways in which they’ve failed one another and their 10-year-old daughter, just before and just after a dreaded meet-the-teacher night.

Director Jim Simpson wisely avoids the pitfalls of acerbic marriage dramas; Judy and Michael are not Edward Albee’s George and Martha, the standard-bearers of misery-seeking-company-in-love. Instead, he’s directed Nicholson and Waterston to deflect one another’s criticisms with a bone-weariness borne of repetition. When Michael whines that Judy doesn’t spend enough time with their daughter (of course, he means with himself), her reaction is a sudden flare of annoyance and then her features relax into furrowed concentration, and she delivers her case while barely paying attention to him. But those flares of annoyance surge faster, brighter and longer as the evening goes on, particularly after they’ve returned from the school shell-shocked by what they’ve learned. Since Parents’ Evening is only 80-minutes long (and that with an intermission), I won’t give much more away, except to say that both Judy and Michael will have dug their claws deep into one another before the evening is through.

And about that intermission. Times are hard, and concessions are easy money, but there’s really no reason why an intermission is required to indicate the passage of time here. Judy and Michael go to the parents’ evening at the end of act one; they return at the top of act two. Since we know exactly where they’re going and where they’ve been, a few moments of appropriate music playing and dimmed lights would have sufficed.

But that’s nit-picking to death a show that delights in its own verbiage, as Doran skewers the couple (Michael suggests giving their daughter D.H. Lawrence novels, after complaints filter back to them about her racy reading material) while they skewer each other. No one is blameless here, and the fun of the second act is watching how quickly both Judy and Michael are willing to sacrifice one another to appease their own fragile egos.

Fresh off the critically acclaimed This at Playwright’s Horizons, Nicholson proves that she should have been doing more theater all along. She’s mastered the art of turning her sweet, slightly stunned countenance into a lethal weapon; her eyes may be wide and her face dusted with freckles, but that just sharpens every critical remark she makes. And Waterston, with his slouchy, goofball charm, makes Michael’s eagerness to be the one wearing the pants both comical and ludicrous. He’ll never manage the balancing act of earning money and spending time with his family, and deep down he knows it. But he’s too unwilling to let go of being able to snap at Judy for failing at the same task to admit it. The happy ending for Michael and Judy feels tacked on and forced, especially for characters that have been so quick to draw fire all along. Far better for Parents’ Evening to have ended just before the final clinch, as the lights slowly dim on Julianne Nicholson sitting alone on the bed, staring into space, her open face suddenly closed.

>>Parents’ Evening

Through May 29, [The Flea Theater], 41 White St. (betw. Broadway & Church St.), 212-352-3101; $35-$40.