PATTY RED PANTS

Through Nov. 26, Theater Catalyst's Eternal Spiral Project at the Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330, www.theatercatalyst.org

This dreary drivel seems to be aimed as a cautionary tale for the middle school crowd: If you drink and do drugs and hang out with boys and spend every waking moment talking about sex, if you don't listen to your parents' warnings about going into the woods, you might wind up like Lisa Michele: dead as a doornail after some lunatic pervert attacks you. The original cautionary tale is, of course, called "Little Red Riding Hood" and the literalizing of the story (i.e., real girl, real woods, real wolf, real red clothes) is only annoying and patronizing: The message behind any literalizing of a metaphor is always that we might not get it otherwise, despite the fact that for quite some time now, the moral of the famous story has been completely clear.

The plot: Two girls, best friends when they are 13, make a variety of sexual discoveries. Since there is nothing unusual or interesting about these discoveries, and since everybody in the theater is over 13, we wonder why we are being told all this.

Kirsten Quinn as Patty's slutty friend turns in a believable and interesting performance; she, at least, realizes that her 13-year-old voice might not suit the woman she has become 11 years later (although the point of this framing device eluded me).

Memo to playwright Trista Baldwin: at least two contemporary playwrights, and untold numbers before them, have seen the sexual subtext in the "Little Red Riding Hood" story -- most notably Bryony Lavery's Frozen (a Tony last year) and Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods (prizes beyond counting).

Memo to director Deborah Block: Even those old bearded guys, the Brothers Grimm, recognized that the power of fairy tales lies in the subtext: Sexuality is far more interesting when it lurks than when it's rolling around on the stage.

Memo to Amy Chmielewski, costume designer: Iron Patty's shirt.

Memo to readers: This short (75 minutes) show feels so long because it's so repetitious; over and over we watch the characters jogging through the woods, over and over we hear endless teenage sex talk, over and over we see Peter Miltz growl and prance as a wolf (Get it? Get it? Just in case you didn't, he'll do a top-hatted imitation of Maurice Chevalier singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"). "Wolf" has always (well, for at least 600 years in English) implied a sexual predator, which is why "wolf whistle" implies unwanted sexual attention. So, we don't need to be taught this metaphor as though it is news. This, combined with much highfalutin chitchat about the unreliability of memory, makes it feel as if the show's a week long.

Memo to me: fuggedaboudit.