Children at Play

Jordan Seavey’s joltingly funny Children at Play isn’t afraid to put the punch back in punch lines. The schoolroom comedy first rope-a-dopes us with cuteness, only to nail us between the eyes with jokes about school shootings, incest and suicide. Crucially, Seavey isn’t just being glib or using shock for its own sake. Despite stylized flourishes (characters offer definitions for friend or parent), Seavey’s real accomplishment lies in capturing—in a terrifyingly realistic way—the blithe menace of growing up.

We first meet the children on their first day of junior high, and in short order we peg Morgan (Susan Louise O’Connor) as the brain with the difficult family, Jeremy (Drew Hirschfield) as the artsy good boy, and Lacey (Boo Killebrew) and adorable Lancelot (Geoffrey Decas) as the mismatched couple. (One clue that Lance may be jousting for the other team? He manipulates Lacey’s breasts like radio dials.) Sex is almost immediately on the (lunch)table; as the kids move up and into high school, we start to think that the constant Chernobyl references may be an unsubtle warning about the danger of overheated rods. Director Scott Ebersold and the company snatch up Seavey’s gauntlet; the spot-on grimness of their concrete classroom perfectly offsets the explosively silly dance breaks, just as the palpable sweetness of the company only makes the chilling moments more paralyzingly awful. (That awfulness is left to the tremendous Jay Potter, who plays a whole menagerie of lecherous male adults.) Losing the initial joyful propulsion, the second act does not quite live up to the first. But then, that’s high school for you.—Helen Shaw

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