Ozma and Harriet

Familiarity with ABC’s “TGIF” sitcom lineup from the early 1990s is helpful for processing Ozma and Harriet. Caffrey’s airy meditation on relationships is so bulked up with allusions to the tidy domestic adventures of the Tanners and the Winslows (among other overworked metaphors) that the play feels most grounded when it mimics the sitcom form itself. The plot treads that timeworn territory: Frank and Harriet’s marriage is on the stale side of comfortable. To cement his busy career as a scientist, Frank creates a functional male android, and inevitably Harriet and the humanoid, known as Ozma, meet cute over family-friendly programming, becoming secret pals (and more).

Instead of digging into the complexities of love and marriage, Ozma and Harriet piles on pop-culture clichés, character tropes, and the inexplicable use of a grubby, grunting film crew that records the proceedings and provides the “TGIF” sound bites. Like a sitcom, the play is committed to being superficially clever over honestly compelling, at the expense of creating a lucid narrative. The actors, including Olansky as an understated Harriet, Martinez’s uptight Frank, and Acevedo’s sweetly confused Ozma, move the action as briskly they can, but this is still a production in which the most affecting moments are found within a fantasy sequence. Relationships that have no stakes, or at least have only predictable ones, are ultimately as unsatisfying and hokey as a laugh track.

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