Theresa Rebeck’s comedy concerns two married couples spending a less than idyllic weekend together

“Goodness is just an anesthetic,” declares one of the characters in Theresa Rebeck’s comedy receiving its New York premiere courtesy of Off-Broadway’s Primary Stages. It’s but one of the many intellectual arguments espoused in this comedy of ideas about two married couples spending the weekend together at a country home. Unfortunately, while the work displays the playwright’s gift for snappy dialogue, it explores its themes in mostly superficial fashion. It mainly comes across as a poor man’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Set entirely in the kitchen of an upstate New York house, it begins, appropriately enough, with an impassioned drunken argument about the nature of goodness between Irish expat Ian (Brian Avers) and Ella (Katie Kreisler). Looking on with increasing discomfort are Ian’s wife Maureen (Heidi Armbruster) and Ella’s husband Peter (Jeff Biehl). The concept of goodness gets sorely tested over the next twenty-four hours, as a tenderly romantic late-night clinch between Ian and Ella, precipitated by his emotional recounting of the recent death of his father, is witnessed by the already paranoid Maureen. The issue comes to the fore the next morning, when Maureen bitterly confronts Ian, who perversely lets her think that he and Ella have been having an affair. The fur really begins to fly when she informs Peter, who refuses to believe that his wife has been unfaithful.