Distracted

TALKING DOWN TO KIDS Nixon reasons with her boy.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

These TONY reviews are short, but I sure hope that by the time I get to the end I remember to praise Lisa Loomer’s Distracted, a giddily clever comedy about parenting in the age of attention deficit disorder. Tangents threaten, since so much in the production deserves kudos: a funny and charismatic cast; Mark Brokaw’s bright, multitasking direction; complex multimedia—not to mention shrewd use of a child actor. Okay, take a breath, before you forget: Distracted is my favorite comedy of the year so far, a spring-jointed issue play hyperactive enough to tickle both your brain and your funny bone.

I’ve been lukewarm on Cynthia Nixon’s previous stage work, but here she’s perfectly cast and tenderly nuanced as the unnamed, smart but jelly-willed Mama whose son is afflicted with a host of behavioral and emotional problems. The manic nine-year-old yells, disobeys, swears and fights with classmates. In short, he’s a pain in the ass. Ask Dad (Stamberg) and his diagnosis is defensively simple: “He’s just a boy!” But Mama, pressured by fellow suburbanite matrons, drifts toward medication—Ritalin and ferreting out hidden toxins in the kid’s environment. Down she goes into a pharmacological rabbit hole, where parental instinct becomes indistinguishable from the trend to pathologize our quirks and find our true selves in a pill.

Mark Wendland’s bi-level set crawls with video projections—Internet windows, TV screens, Impressionist paintings, children’s drawings—all neatly underscoring the theme of a leveled-off modern mindscape. Loomer’s dizzyingly fast-thinking script is a model of economy and wit, and if she doesn’t dwell too long on a particular scene, that’s so much the better.—David Cote

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