Hello Failure

THE WIFE OF BATH Kosmas pines for her absent hubby.

Photograph: Justin Bernhaut

The title Hello Failure is too hard on itself: Kristen Kosmas’s new play, a wobbly exercise in the newly popular school of realist whimsy, is more like Hello—So Close! or Hello, Keep About Half. The piece stays loyal to its subgenre’s precepts, which lean on the bewitching oddity of everyday speech, but gets the texture right at the cost of content. Its heroine, Rebecca—played wispily by the playwright herself—never gains a grasp on our sympathies, and Kosmas (both as writer and performer) settles for an air of wistfulness: a lazy emotion that fritters away the propulsive qualities of her superb dialogue.

From her bathtub, Rebecca—a borderline shut-in—misses her submariner husband and composes letters to Civil War–era submersible inventor Horace Healey. In a riff on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Healey’s specter (Matthew Maher) pops by to jolly Rebecca out of her sulks, a job that would normally fall to her similarly work-widowed chums. Across town, the members of her support group are running into their own problems, leading to an utterly unsuspenseful question: Will they check on Rebecca or get coffee? Ken Rus Schmoll presides over a no-frills production that nonetheless boasts a spectacular ensemble. Maria Striar hisses submarine trivia at us, Joan Jubett recommends infidelity with a dirty wink, and Tricia Rodley grumbles hilariously; the dreamy-eyed Kosmas alone is miscast. Perhaps by firing herself she could rescue her play, or at least gain the perspective to make it dive a little deeper.

—Helen Shaw