Theatre in Review: Your Mother's Copy of the Kama Sutra (Playwrights Horizons)Kirk Lynn's new play has so many peculiarities that it's hard to pick just one. So let's start at the beginning. Reggie and Carla, a young couple, are playing a sex game; he is blindfolded and she is describing herself in provocative terms and commanding him to take his clothes off. He is clearly excited with this sort of role play and she is clearly the take-charge type. The scene reaches an unexpected climax when Reggie suddenly proposes marriage to Carla. She agrees, but with one major proviso. As Reggie, having a drink with Tony, his ex-girlfriend, explains, "The condition under which Carla agrees to marry me is we -- Carla and I -- are gonna reenact our entire sexual histories with each other. ON each other. To be completed within the year before our wedding day." This is not some theoretical exercise. Reggie and Carla set out to recreate each of their formative sexual experiences, the idea being that they can't really know each other until they have shared them all. This leads to all sorts of discoveries. Reggie enters, clad in a red silk robe, looking stunned. "Wow," he says. "So that's a strap-on." This is followed by several minutes of discussion about the implications of his first experience with anal penetration. I'll bet not even Dr. Ruth ever heard about something like this. While I'm tempted to say, Kids, don't try this at home, it seems to work splendidly for Reggie and Carla, until the night before their wedding, when it turns out that there is one experience that Reggie hasn't shared. "You've been unfaithful to me," says Carla, furiously, having learned about it from Tony. The reason Reggie has kept mum, however, is because the experience was traumatic; as a boy, he was sexually abused by his brother. Once this news is out, Carla demands, and gets, a re-enactment. Interspersed with the adventures of Reggie and Carla are scenes focusing on Bernie, a high school senior, and Sean, a classmate who would like to date her. At a party, Cole, Sean's friend, serves them both drinks laced with a date rape drug. This leads to a horrified morning after for Bernie and Sean, who may have both been interfered with; both of them are so reticent, it's hard to say, but for one thing, their pants are missing. In any case, they begin frantically trying to concoct a story that will explain to their parents why they stayed out all night and are returning home in such bedraggled condition. It's not until Act II that it becomes clear that Bernie is the daughter of Reggie and Carla, her scenes take place two decades after Reggie and Carla's wedding, Carla has long since died, and Reggie has become a frustrated and unhelpful parent. The rest of the play focuses on Reggie, who, to say the least, has boundary issues, and his efforts to get the truth out of Bernie about her wild night, and, by extension, for them to work out an honest and workable relationship. Actually, Bernie may have had her fill of honesty; among other things, she is thoroughly aware of her parents' premarital exploits. It would be easy to write off Your Mother's Copy of the Kama Sutra as a nutty sexcapade from a playwright who may have read The Harrad Experiment one too many times, but Lynn has a way with dialogue; a scene in which Tony, who has been brought in to assist Reggie, tries to worm the truth out of Bernie positively crackles. And there's a sharply amusing encounter between Reggie and Sean, in which Reggie makes clear he can't stand the young man but intends to become his best friend, the better to keep tabs on Sean's relationship with Bernie. (As Reggie sees it, they have seven months until graduation, at which point Bernie and Sean, matriculating at different colleges, will move on, romantically speaking.) Then again, it would be helpful if anyone in the play ever talked about something, anything, other than sex. The plotting is wildly illogical. After Reggie admits that his brother abused him, there are no consequences, either psychological, practical, or legal. Similarly, Sean rats on Cole to his parents, who punish their son but apparently decline to contact his victim's parents. The play never stops to consider for a second that Carla's fantasy reenactments might be either impractical or destructive. Lynn also tries too hard, spinning what are meant to be bravura sequences but which sometimes land with a thud. The most prominent of these is Reggie's account, to Bernie, of his sexual encounter with the dying Carla in her hospital bed. It is a near-disaster; they are caught by the distinctly unamused hospital staff and Reggie remembers it as the worst sex he has ever had. Clearly, we are meant to see this as an example of Carla's indomitable, life-loving, force-of-nature personality, but basically it sounds borderline insane. Under Anne Kauffman's direction, the cast goes a long way toward making these preposterous characters and situations seem halfway plausible. Zoë Sophia Garcia captures Carla's volatile nature well, and she has a strong chemistry with Chris Stack as Reggie. Rebecca Henderson mines Tony's hard-boiled dialogue for all it's worth, but the character is a male playwright's fantasy: the tough-talking ex-girlfriend who, under the brittle wisecracks, pines for the hero, dropping everything to fly across the country, fix his family, and offer him a free blowjob. And even the talented Henderson can't do much with a scene in which she rehearses a eulogy for Carla that begins, "So, to be honest, there are a lot of you here I'd prefer to be burying." Ismenia Mendes and Maxx Brawer nicely capture Bernie and Sean's rising panic as well as their combative poses when faced with snooping adults. For reasons best known to them, Kauffman has encouraged Laura Jellinek, the set designer, to place the action in what looks like the empty living room of a suburban tract house. Emily Rebholz's costumes are all right once you figure out that she is doing nothing to distinguish the play's two time frames. Ben Stanton's lighting and Daniel Kluger's sound and original music are both fine. Even in its better moments, Your Mother's Copy of the Kama Sutra seems like an exercise by a playwright who has posed a proposition he pursues without concern for logic or psychology. For a play about the power of one's emotions, it is weirdly unfelt, with characters who are little more than slaves to their author's whim. Whatever happens next to Reggie, I hope he doesn't take up relationship counseling.--David Barbour 
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