Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra
Opening Night: March 29, 2014
Closing: May 11, 2014
Theater: Playwrights Horizons
Carla agrees to marry Reggie on one condition: to break down any walls between them, they’ll reenact their individual sexual histories with one another, good and bad, for better or worse. Years later, these stories bring unexpected hope to their household, now forced to confront those barriers a second time. Kirk Lynn’s tough-love comedy navigates the boundaries of intimacy, finding startling empathy in the story of a father hell-bent on saving his family.
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April 22, 2014
From the prolific imagination of Kirk Lynn—already on display this season in Stop Hitting Yourself and Bum Phillips All-American Opera—springs this comedy about love and sexual history. The sharp Anne Kauffman (Belleville) directs. In one area, Kirk Lynn’s ambitious Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra is explosively efficient: namely, at getting its audience to cringe. Even before the plot’s erotic games begin, Lynn’s title insists that we think about our parents in flagrante. By the uneven drama’s punishing end, a teenage character will be on the floor in the fetal position, begging her father to stop revealing his sexual past. I would have done the same, but you can’t really get your legs up under you in those Playwrights Horizons seats.
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April 21, 2014
Somewhere between the eras of Victorian modesty and social-media self-indulgence, the concept of privacy fell out of favor. We broadcast our most unflattering moments, offer the world our every thought and feeling (no matter how inflammatory), and do everything we can to facilitate an opportunity to pull out our "I don’t care what you think" badges — all in the name of self-expression. Though playwright Kirk Lynn of Austin, Texas’ Rude Mechs theater collective is staying out of this technological sandbox, he has infused its consequential "more is more" mentality into his new play, Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra, now playing at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater.
READ THE REVIEWApril 21, 2014
Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra is a title much like the play itself—less saucy and more cumbersome than it should be. Playwright Kirk Lynn, whose incendiary adaptation of the comic strip Get Your War On for the Rude Mechanicals signaled the emergence of a great satirist, here employs frank language and adult situations to talk about the dangerous thresholds people cross in the quest for total intimacy with each other. But while the behavior on stage may cause a slight blush in the faces of subscribers to Off Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons, where the show is running through May 11, Kirk’s script contains no dark ironies or edgy surprises. Despite punchy dialogue and a few much-appreciated segues into the ludicrous, it is not as tough or as naughty as it thinks it is.
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April 21, 2014
Given the amorous activities suggested by the play’s title, it’s probably a good thing that Kirk Lynn’s Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra is not significantly about anyone’s parents having sex. That would, however, be less of a problem if the new quasi-comedy that just opened at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in a Playwrights Horizons production could consistently find anything else to say. But Lynn, who was recently represented Off-Broadway as part of the writing team behind Lincoln Center Theater’s Stop Hitting Yourself, does not so much trouble himself with questions of content or coherence. A simple question, about whether it’s possible for two people — any two people — to truly know each other, is enough to start things promisingly, if not end them well.
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April 21, 2014
If the title Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies (isn’t your mother’s copy of Fifty Shades of Grey mortifying enough?), rest assured that something in this new play by Kirk Lynn certainly will. Maybe the scene in which a college kid encourages a shy friend to spritz the drink of a girl he likes with a little rohypnol, otherwise known as the “date rape drug.” If you don’t bat an eye at that, maybe you’ll be unhinged by the scene in which a man and woman re-enact his traumatic sexual abuse at the hands of an older brother. Mr. Lynn’s odd, unwieldy play about sexual transgression and the search for true intimacy, which opened on Monday night in the smaller upstairs theater at Playwrights Horizons, rests on a conceit that suits its strange title (although there’s no mention of that ancient Hindu guide to sexual variety, and no mother really either).
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