The Country Club

If you know anything about this hit comedy by Douglas Carter Beane (As Bees in Honey Drown), then you've probably heard that movie actor Tom Everett Scott (That Thing You Do!) appears fully, frontally nude, along with costars Callie Thorne and T. Scott Cunningham. The rest of the play lacks such sensation: Over the course of 11 holidays — Martin Luther King Jr. Day, etc. — several suburban thirtysomething WASPs gather in a restricted country club to drink, tell stories about the good old days (i.e., high school), and avoid acknowledging their collective moral bankruptcy. And, not surprisingly, with cutesy, sorta-ironic monikers like Soos (Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon), Zip (Scott), and Froggy (Jessica Stone), the pretentious Pennsylvanians prove to be even more vacuous than their pristine, symbolically all-white surroundings. For social satire, this is about as sharp as American cheese. Laughing at the seersucker set, after all, is nothing new — though sometimes it can be fun. B-