All My Love

“We can’t just use sex to avoid any serious communication,” explains All My Love’s central character, Ellen. Unfortunately, Tony Fiorentino’s new play has opposite problems in the bedroom, exchanging emotionally sincere communication for a prosaic potboiler of a plot. A psychologist who’s a practitioner of not only sexual therapy but polyamory, the divorced mother of precocious twin teenage girls lives with her boyfriend, Jack, while maintaining intimate relationships with other men, including crunchy young yoga teacher Myles. All My Love sits atop a gold mine of provocative material, but, in positioning it as a domestic drama—one with an air of Desperate Housewives implausibility, even—Fiorentino misses the chance to really explore what motivates men and women to push the boundaries of traditional relationships.

A parallel plot about Ellen’s daughters’ growing independence and their grapplings with their own sexuality further dilutes any possible, real engagement with the issues. Though the actors are adept and spirited, especially Gotz and Pechman as the twins, the characters are built precariously upon their ability to spout quick retorts and slick academic facts. By the time their inner demons do show up, it’s considerably difficult to see Ellen (a too-young Keach) as more than a haughty, analytical bitch who’s messed up her equally overbearing kids and her helpless boyfriend (Fiorentino). Though the play’s most straitlaced character, a hopeful high-school geometry teacher named Hallie, does inject some energy into the proceedings with a clear motivation (and a charming, unaffected turn by Ellison), the show’s still by the textbook—full of information and, ultimately, predictable.

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