Baby, Boom!

by Toby Zinman

And once again we learn how hard it is to write a second act. Trojan Wars starts out well: Act 1 is funny, insightful and full of great zingers delivered by a right-on-the-money cast, but then things get goopy and All-Too-Meaningful. Playwright Gin Hobbs has an accurate ear for teenage desperation and stupidity and cynicism, but when she wades into topics like self-forgetful love and maternal self-sacrifice and the contradictions between Jesus' teachings and the Catholic Church, she's way out of her depth. Shallow is her strength.

The title refers to condoms, not ancient Greece; we meet Charlotte (Jennifer Kulick), a teenager in a Catholic school uniform who has just taken yet another pregnancy test and discovered yet again that it's positive. Her best friend Kat (the excellent and subtle Elyssa Phillips), also in uniform, spends much of the play trying in a variety of ways to help her friend abort the baby ("It's not easy kicking the shit out of the unborn"). Billy (Dylan Clements), the condom-less boyfriend, also helps out in a helpless and reluctant way, and they are occasionally and surreally interrupted by imagined quizzes and chastisements from the nuns who are their teachers.

Charlotte's mother (Christine Mascitti) is the weak link, both in the script and in the cast; the mother's reactions are implausible and her character underdeveloped — although she has one great line: "You're not even grown yet, and already you're completely awful." (I would bet that Hobbs has been a teenager but not a mother of a teenager, and is still working out some remnants of teenage hostility and guilt.)

Deborah Seif directs with style and speed, although the bizarre scene that ends the play defeats even her firm hand, and the conclusion provokes a blank and puzzled "whatever" rather than an "Oh, I see." Joe Koroly provides an uncannily accurate 15-year-old girl's room: the stuff sticking out of shut bureau drawers, the pictures on the "Wall of Hate," the flowered comforter and the inevitable kitten calendar.

TROJAN WARS Through July 31, Eternal Spiral Project at Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330, www.teatercatalyst.org