HBO’s The Sex Life Of College Girls meets William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well in Chance Theater’s California Premiere of Keiko Green’s overlong but devilishly clever The Bed Trick.

Shakespeare aficionados will recall the play’s titular deception as the means employed by All’s Well heroine Helena to get herself impregnated by her not-so-loving husband Bertram. (It’s a long story, but in a nutshell, Bertram thinks he’s in bed with a virgin named Diana but it’s really his still untouched wife he’s boinking.)

Said bed trick is also one of the main reasons for our college freshman narrator Harriet’s (Sophia Blake) fascination with the the Shakespearean romcom, one she’d dearly love to be starring in were it not for her school’s vexing refusal to allow first-year students to tread the boards. (That she herself would never have been born had a similar bed trick not taken place eighteen years and nine months earlier has something to do with it too.)

In the meantime, Harriet must content herself with reenacting Shakespeare with the aid of her favorite stuffed animals as her roommates Marianne (Mae Linh Young) and Lulu (Zoe Hertzberg) gallivant out and about in the real world, the former determined to finally lose her v-card and the latter doing her best to adjust to a “long-distance” relationship with her high school boyfriend Willis (Khoi Le) who’s in school a whopping 30-minute drive away.

Things begin to get complicated when Lulu decides to test Willis’s love by setting up a fake online dating profile using the undeniably attractive Harriet’s name and photo to sweeten the pot and then enlisting Marianne to respond as “Harriet,” not realizing that her bestie has a thing for Willis, or that “Harriet” and Willis will soon be not only exchanging text after text but spending hours talking on the phone as Marianne hides her real identity by claiming that her cell’s camera is broken.

 Talk about a tangled web of deception to do Shakespeare proud, and that’s not taking into account Marianne’s recently divorced parents, her college prof dad Benny (Erik Dylan Matibag) and her mother Anna (Karen O’Hanlon), who’s moved south to Florida to enjoy the single life as her former hubby stays mostly holed up in his office up north.

As ingenious in its set-up as it is in its execution, The Bed Trick also provides plenty of food for thought about morality in general (and consent in particular) as seen through the eyes of its Gen Z collegians and their less “evolved” Millennial parents.

It’s a heady mix of characters, plotlines, and sexual politics that would work even better had Green trimmed a chunk from her play’s two-hour-and-twenty-minute running time the better to focus on the college foursome and not so much on Marianne’s parents, because for this reviewer at least (and despite Matibag and in particular O’Hanlon’s terrific work), The Bed Trick loses momentum whenever the action shifts to Benny and Anna.

Indeed, the best reason not to miss The Bed Trick at the Chance is the chance to discover its charismatic, captivating quartet of Gen Z’ers delivering the goods under H. Adam Harris’s pizzazzy direction.

The delightful Blake is every single drama-obsessed theater kid you’ve ever met, Young is girl-next door perfection as Marianne, Hertzberg gives us a Lulu who is as outwardly confident as she is inwardly insecure, and Le combines good boy sweetness with bad boy sex appeal.

Finally, it’s hard to imagine another The Bed Trick being given as fabulous a production design as the one it’s been given at the Chance, beginning with Fred Kinney’s superbly detailed multi-locale set, stunningly lit by Andrew Hungerford.

Not only that, but Ayrika Johnson’s costumes suit each Zoomer and Millennial to a T, and thumbs up go too to Lia Weed’s sound design mix of music and effects.

Darah Barenholtz is assistant director. Meredith Phanco is assistant scenic designer. Jasmine Sunoo-Flanders is dramaturg. Shinshin Yuder Tsai is casting and intimacy director. Jordan Jones is stage manager.

You don’t have to be a Shakespeare fan to savor Keiko Green’s The Bed Trick, though it’s a definite plus if you are. Even minus the trims that would make it even more effective, it’s contemporary theater at its edgy, entertaining best.

Chance Theater, 5522 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills. Through October 4. Friday at 8:00, Saturday at 3:00 and 8:00, Sunday at 3:00.
www.chancetheater.org

–Steven Stanley
September 26, 2026
Photos: Eric Keitel Photography

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

Tags: Chance Theater, Keiko Green, Orange County Theater Review, William Shakespeare