My First Time | Live review

My First Time at Broken Nose Theatre

Photo: Elizabeth Wycklendt

How many of us would wish for a second chance at our first time? Broken Nose Theatre can't help you there, but it can give you another shot at My First Time. Following a Chicago debut this summer, Broken Nose has remounted its production of the Off Broadway reality-theater piece in a late-night run at the Greenhouse Theater Center.

New York theater producer Ken Davenport adapted the show from the anonymous entries on the website myfirsttime.com, a sort of sex-specific, primitive PostSecret that dates back to the Internet-prehistoric days of 1997. Davenport arranges snippets from the site for a quartet of actors seated on a row of stools, reminiscent of similarly fashioned shows like The Vagina Monologues or Love, Loss and What I Wore. Shorter takes are grouped in rat-a-tat style around themes such as the setting or age at which the contributors lost their virginity; other tales are presented at greater depth, interspersed with sex statistics and anecdotes from that night's audience, collected preshow via anonymous survey.

The tone of the stories ranges from smirky and bragadocious to regretful or occasionally shocking. Yet while the recollections are intimate, they never feel sensationalized in director Benjamin Brownson's even-keeled staging, preceded at each performance by a different Chicago storyteller relating his or her own first time. My First Time continues Fridays at 11pm through October 27; see greenhousetheater.org for more info.