A menopausal wife informs her husband of thirty-five years that she never wants to have sex again, not with him, not with anybody. A young wife’s sudden success threatens a husband whose career isn’t going nearly as well. Gay Walch’s The End Of Sex (Or What’s Wrong With Mom), the latest Victory Theatre Center World Premiere is nothing if not conversation-provoking.

The last thing Ken (Tom Ormeny) expects when arriving home this afternoon is the announcement his wife Nancy (Sara Botsford) is about to make, not with the couple’s overnight house guests first and foremost on his mind.

What could have provoked their son Brandon’s nineteen-year-old employee and his girlfriend to go straight to their room last night and stay there till noon instead of dining with their hosts? Is it, Ken wonders, that times have changed, or could Nancy be right that “they want to have a sex marathon in our house”?

Whatever disagreement the longtime spouses may have where matters of their guests’ sex life are concerned, however, pales in comparison with the bombshell Nancy drops when Ken discovers she has hidden his little blue pills.

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she tells her recently rejuvenated husband, “but I’d be just as happy if we didn’t do it anymore. I’m done.”

And things go from bad to worse when their daughter Heather (Austin Highsmith) and son-in-law Ryan (Chad Coe) arrive for dinner and it becomes clear that Heather’s book’s upcoming NYC launch party and the fast track she’s on towards USC tenure has Chad fuming with envy, the one-time aspiring rock musician finding it nigh on impossible to jump start a career change.

Can Nancy and Ken and Heather and Ryan regain their marital footing given such diametrically opposed points of view in matters of sex and business success? Can a man’s sexual appetite and a woman’s need for intimacy ever truly mesh? How much have things really changed in male-female dynamics over the past four decades if a wife’s fame and fortune is still seen as her husband’s failure?

Though The End Of Sex (Or What’s Wrong With Mom) is short enough to run straight through without an intermission, playwright Walch wisely inserts one, the better to to allow audiences members to talk amongst themselves.

That’s not to say her play is free of faults.

Dialog doesn’t always ring true, whether because it’s there to convey information (“You have an interesting job as a hospice administrator and I help people invest their savings.”) or because real folks don’t talk like textbooks (“I get that for women intercourse isn’t the easiest road to orgasm.”)

Sitcom one-liners spark The End Of Sex (Or What’s Wrong With Mom)’s laugh-infused first act (Nancy: “They’re up there fucking like rabbits.” Ken: “Oh, I’m sure they’re taking breaks.”), then vanish post-intermission when things get deadly serious with a credibility-defying trip to the hospital ER whose consequences are left hanging.

So too are the two couples’ marital issues, so much so that Walch’s play feels rather like a TV series that’s been cancelled before the writers had a chance to write a finale.

Director Maria Gobetti elicits the evening’s most memorable, authentic performance from a captivating, heartfelt Highsmith, and Coe is quite good too, scoring added points for Ryan’s wry comebacks.

The older couple, on the other hand, is less successful at making Walch’s sometimes awkwardly written dialog sound spontaneous.

Lianna Liew shows up to engaging effect in an eleventh-hour confrontation that proves that the more things change …

Production design could not be better, from Evan Bartoletti’s lovely-to-look-at, beautifully detailed, unexpectedly versatile set to Carol Doehring’s rich lighting design to Lauri Fitzsimmons’ stylish costumes and just-right props to sound designer Noah Andrade’s scene-linking original music and authentic effects.

The End Of Sex (Or What’s Wrong With Mom) is produced by Gobetti and Ormeny. Kathleen Bailey directs 2nd company members Kathy Dailey, John Idakitis, Brit Landa, Isaac Kaufman, and Linnea Hedberg at scheduled alternate-cast performances.

Antonieta Castillo Carpio is stage manager and Juliana Nassr, Lara Heine, and Crystal Hui are assistant stage managers.

With issues as provocative as those raised in The End Of Sex (Or What’s Wrong With Mom), audiences can expect to find themselves exchanging ideas long after the lights go out. As a finished work of theater, however, the Victory’s latest still has a ways to go.

The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 West Victory Blvd., Burbank.
www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org

–Steven Stanley
May 12, 2019
Photos: Tim Sullens

Tags: Gay Walch, Los Angeles Theater Review, The Victory Theatre Center