Mostly Sheep’s Clothing

  Wolves, Delaney Britt Brewer’s new triptych of tenuously connected short plays, suffers from the usual tribulations of an evening of short plays—mainly, a varying level of success.

The evening begins with “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” which takes to task aging liberal arts grads and their deceptions, both of themselves and of others. Caleb (Josh Tyson) and Kay (Elizabeth A. Davis) have just moved in together after three years of dating, but neither of them seems particularly thrilled about it. Driving home from a party thrown by Kay’s pretentious friends Pierce (Richard Saudek) and Roslyn (Sarah Baskin, who is Acting with a capital “A”), Caleb hits a wolf, and the rest of the play alternates between flashbacks to the party and Kay and Caleb’s relationship represented in microcosm by the dying wolf.

Unfortunately, director Mike Klar can’t get the performances to cohere. Part of the problem is Brewer is writing about a generation who play-act being adults post-graduation, throwing awkward dinner parties and spouting pretentious statements (“Caleb is like a Philip Roth kind of writer,” Kay explains, even though she doesn’t like Roth) that have no relation to real life. But that doesn’t explain Saudek’s bizarre, languidly bitchy performance, which seems less uninterested and more intent on inflicting the maximum amount of damage. And Davis, looking like a little girl playing dress-up, never believably captures what keeps Kay immobilized in her relationship with Caleb. Only Tyson turns in a creditable performance as a good-natured guy who wakes up at the age of 30 in terror.

After intermission (annoyingly unnecessary for a play that runs just 95 minutes with it), Brewer fulfills the glimmers of promise that she has shown with “Crying Wolf,” an oblique, hallucinatory story about brother and sister Elliot (Doug Roland) and Julie (Megan Hart) waiting in the woods with a bottle of booze and an unmentioned urn. As they bicker and grudgingly talk about their lives, Brewer deftly reveals just enough to keep us interested without resorting to obvious exposition. Eventually, Julie is left alone on the lake, to be visited by the apparitions of a wolf and her former lover Sasha (Julie Fitzpatrick), whom, we learn, is now in a relationship with Caleb. Both Roland and Hart (who has the emotional fragility of a young Jennifer Jason Leigh) have a casualness to their performances that highlights their wounded hearts, even as they worry about one another’s inability to deal with grief.

But the power of “Crying Wolf” merely serves to point up the weaknesses of the final short, “A Wolf at the Door,” about Sasha and Caleb’s failing relationship. Now parents, they communicate mostly through notes, read aloud by their daughter Wolf (Vikki Vasiliki Eugenis). Sasha works; Caleb has returned to his book and an affair with a younger woman he met at that long ago party. Their marriage is awkward and unlikely, and all of the verve and irreverent energy that marked Fitzpatrick’s Sasha in “Crying Wolf” has melted away, leaving a frazzled woman who worries that her daughter is eating too much Taco Bell.

When the play ends with Sasha and Caleb walking offstage, hand in hand with Wolf, the likelihood of them making their relationship into a success is slim. The wolf at the door was long ago welcomed in, and nothing can mitigate the fact that we know so little about what drew them together that neither is worth rooting for. But Brewer, who has a keen ear for the foibles and ill-fitting facades that people in pain adopt, is definitely a new voice worth rooting for.

Wolves

Through Aug. 21, 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St. (betw. Park & Madison Aves.), 212-279-4200; $18