Romance and Therapy on the Small Stage

​Deliciously awkward romantic comedy stumbles its way onstage with grace and poise in Kith and Kin’s The Hypotheticals. Subtly stunning Selena Milewski is irresistible as a woman who has been sent to see a psychiatric professional. Her employer has required her to do so before she is cleared to return to work. On her way in to her first appointment, she stops a handsome stranger in an elevator and has a brief romantic encounter with him before she can face the tedium of dealing with a psychiatrist. The problem is...the man in question turns out to have been the psychiatrist that she had an appointment with.


Doctor and client are forced to negotiate therapy AND romance together in a complex landscape of lies, insecurities and uncertainty.  Shayne Patrick balances official concern with endearing interpersonal vulnerability as Jamie. Patrick and Milewski have a respectable deal of chemistry together. The more intricate beats of the comedy might not be perfectly articulated onstage, but the emotional connection between the two characters is clearly present in a cute and satisfying romantic comedy.


Playwright Rebecca Anne Nguyen negotiates some pretty tricky terrain as both the leads are struggling to make sense of the world while making sense of their feelings for each other. The strikingly clever bit about the set-up to the play is the SO much of the romantic interaction between patient and clinician is presented exclusively in therapy sessions. Romantic comedy has a tendency to involve characters who exhibit behaviors that could be classified as mental illness were they not romantic fiction. It’s impossible to get lost in any kind of fictional romance without psychoanalyzing the characters on some level. Nguyen’s script addresses this directly by having the vast majority of the romance right there in a psychiatric office.


The psychiatric talk might be a bit too tedious for the wrong kind of audience. For the right kind of audience it might not go far enough. Deeper concerns beyond the romance ARE revealed in the course of the story, but the interaction between Blaise and her doctor lacks the proper intensity crisply quirky nuance that would turn it into something truly brilliant. There IS a hell of a lot of neurosis and anxiety being appealingly flung about onstage...but it doesn’t quite land perfectly. Nguyen’s script is too lost in the clinical exploration between the two characters to allow much time for the fun playfulness of a young romance to properly present itself onstage. There ARE moments of sexiness and whimsical romance, but they seem a bit overpowered by the clinical machinery of a plot that sometimes seems hopelessly buried in the DSM-5.


For all its cute, little flaws, The Hypotheticals remains a fun, little trip to the romantic stage. The electrical exhilaration of romance is one of the easiest special effects to put on the live stage, but it’s allowed on the local small stage so very, very infrequently. A romance like The Hypotheticals is frustratingly rare. It makes a show like Nguyen’s all the more precious.


Kith and Kin Theatre Company’s production of The Hypotheticalsiruns through April 21st at Inspiration Studios on 1500 S. 73rd St. in West Allis. For more information, visit Kith and Kin online.