This at Theater Wit | Theater review

Thirtysomething Jane (Spence) has been metaphorically sleepwalking since her husband passed away a year ago. Her college friends, married couple Merrill (Mojekwu) and Tom (Byrnes) and token gay Alan (Fain)—who, crucially to later matters, is possessed of perfect memory—want to goose her to move on by introducing her to French hottie Jean-Pierre (Hadnagy): “He’s a Doctor Without Borders.” But the dinner-party game by which they’re introduced sets in motion an unexpected series of events that will test Merrill and Tom’s marriage and Jane’s friendship with them both.

As a fan of New York playwright Gibson’s structurally quirky, proudly weird earlier works [sic] and Suitcase, or those that resemble flies from a distance, I was a bit thrown by the conventionality of her concerns in This. It’s as though, given her first Playwrights Horizons commission (the Off Broadway institution premiered This in 2009), Gibson tried to up her appeal to that theater’s audience by borrowing a plot from Jon Robin Baitz.

Still, some of Gibson’s idiosyncrasies shine through, particularly her sharp dialogue’s obsession with language games and the minutiae of communication. And This does arrive at some striking observations about the what-ifs of love that never go away. Wechsler’s strong cast fills in the gaps—Spence offers an unshowy portrait of subsumed grief, while Fain makes comic hay of a character who is little more than a mnemonic device.