STAGE: Skintight

We were very glad to have caught the last night of Joshua Harmon’s Skintight at the Geffen Playhouse. It was funny, clever, and leaves you with things to ponder that stay with you after you’ve stopped laughing. Of course it was a treat to see Idina Menzel, who has been with the show since even before the off-Broadway run. (At this point in her career, this is something she would only be doing for the love of it.) Skintight is a very modern family drama. Menzel plays Jodi, whose freshly ex-husband has just married the half-his-age aerobics instructor that he left Jodi for. The play opens with Jodi dropping in on her father, Elliot (Harry Groener), a long-widowed-and-now-gay billionaire fashion designer (a Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger type), ostensibly to surprise him for his birthday, but really just looking for some support. Her studying-abroad son Ben (Eli Gelb), also gay, is coming in for the weekend as well. Elliot lives a very ordered life and doesn’t care for surprises, but Jodi’s about to get a surprise herself. Her father’s latest “partner” Trey (Will Brittain) is 20 years old, the same age as her son. That set-up is a rich vein to mine for both drama and laughs, and this play runs with both. Can one love beauty, or is that just lust? Are relationships all transactional at bottom? What do parents owe children, and what do children owe parents? These are just some of the questions that Harmon smuggles in with the comedy, along with a funny observation about the Ten Commandments, and why tens of thousands of Hungarians might have a Jewish name embossed on their skin. Skin turns out to be a running theme, appearing throughout the play figuratively, metaphorically, and literally: Skin as in the depth of beauty, skin as the beauty of youth and betrayer of age (botox notwithstanding), the skin that Trey unreservedly shows off. Skin as a symbol of kinship, the relationships you’re born with and cannot shed. It’s all there in two acts and a great ensemble performance.