Jack Neary’s Five Nickels is a pleasant but all-too-unambitious examination of male/female relationships at various points along the age spectrum. There’s nothing even slightly daring about the play, which is somewhat reminiscent of early Neil Simon or maybe Love American Style, and it’s hard to guess what sort of calculation led Venue Ensemble Theatre to produce it. An undemanding workout for developing actors? An attempt to rescue a script from oblivion? Still, the Venue performers do a mostly creditable job of presenting the four vignettes that make up the entertainment, and there are a few good laughs in the course of the evening.
So let’s look on the bright side:
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2010.
