What’s really mysterious about Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love and Sex is her rendering of the word mystery itself, in the title: singular rather than plural, as if there were only one. As if anybody who’s reached the age of interest (i.e., most living humans) can’t easily think of 10,000 riddles, enigmas, conundrums, and secrets relating to love and sex and the interactions thereof. Sure, we all spend our lives asking a single question when it comes to those subjects—a bewildered “Hunh?” But that hunh means something different every single goddamn time.
Howard (the usually excellent Keith Kupferer, somewhat too teddy bearish this time around) became a successful, workaholic novelist specializing in detective fiction, and Lucinda, naturally, grew to revile him. Together they engendered Charlotte (Hayley Burgess): talkative, passionate, sweetly manic, and entirely too unguarded. She and Jonny have been soul mates since they were nine years old, the age at which Charlotte tried to commit suicide—a coincidence that goes oddly unremarked in the script. When we first meet them, during their freshman year at college, Charlotte and Jonny’s affinity is as total as it is unconventional, given that Jonny is a black boy from a broken home. And they enjoy that about themselves. “I feel like we’re this model of how the world should be,” Charlotte tells Jonny while sitting around in her dorm room. “There should totally be a documentary about us,” Jonny replies.
Through 7/2: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM Writers Theatre 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe 847-242-6000writerstheatre.org $35-$80
