First Nighter: Nancy Harris’s Our New Girl Unsure of Herself

Nancy Harris certainly knows how to put the parts together for a creepy-crawly experience. Our New Girl, her play at Atlantic II, could be regarded as Mary Poppins meets The Bad Seed meets Turn of the Screw with a glancing God of Carnage acquaintanceship. The problem flares when she doesn’t quite suss out what to do with the elements once she’s got them in place. The first thing she shows you is young Daniel (10-year-old Henry Kelemen) in the dead of night moving about a good-looking London kitchen Timothy R. Mackabee has designed. Just when it looks as if the methodical lad is going to cut off his right ear Vincent Van Gogh-like with a hefty knife, the teaser scene ends. Next thing you know, very pregnant Hazel (Mary McCann) is in the now day-lighted kitchen telling Annie (Lisa Joyce), who has a valise by her side, that no, she has no need for Annie’s services as a nanny and, anyway, she had no idea one was arriving out of the blue. Annie explains it was Hazel’s absent-in-Haiti dermatologist husband Richard (CJ Wilson) who arranged for a nanny’s services.