Miss Abigail’s Guide to Dating, Mating & Marriage is a tepid affair, a retro look at male-female relations that’s so tame and unimaginative, you have to wonder why anyone would think to stage it in the year 2010. My best guess is that it’s aimed at the elderly — at any audience member old enough to remember the 1950s dating scene and before. But for a human American raised in the 60s or later, Miss Abigail’s approach is just barely interesting and not particularly entertaining. Further, the loveplay between the title character and her Mexican assistant Paco (Mauricio Perez) is so palpably insincere, it never once wins our credulity. There are a few pleasant moments in the 78 minutes of the play — some good jokes, an all-too-brief montage of sex-education film clips, the occasional bit of advice that still rings true — but mostly this show is pre-Playboy, pre-Dick and Liz, pre-Helen Gurly Brown, pre-Masters and Johnson. On the hotness scale, it rates a chaste peck on the cheek.
The evening starts out promisingly enough. Miss Abigail (Laurie Birmingham), a late-middle-age matron in a red dress and glasses, informs us that she’s going to show us all her recipes for romance. She explains that five years ago she read (in the Star) about the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston breakup, and that it moved her to want to help a new generation to solve its dating and mating dilemmas. After all, wasn’t she married for 25 years to a wonderful guy named Robert? And wasn’t that back when the divorce rate wasn’t 50 percent? Miss Abigail has an idea: let’s look at a past era’s dating guides and marriage manuals. Maybe they hold the answer to today’s mind-boggling relationship woes ….
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.