The Coen brothers have been accused of favoring high style over emotion. Anybody who’s seen “A Serious Man” or “True Grit” knows that just ain’t so.
The accusation hits closer to home when it comes to Ethan Coen’s stage work. Without his brother, Joel, Ethan is free to indulge in snappy dialogue and high-concept premises without concern for psychological insights.
This applies once again to his first full-length play, “Women or Nothing,” about two lesbians’ attempt to have a baby.
At least the show is a marked improvement on Coen’s earlier efforts — three uneven collections of short pieces at the Atlantic and the appalling one-act “Talking Cure” (about a mental-hospital patient and his therapist) in Broadway’s “Relatively Speaking” two years ago.
This new production is so stylishly directed by David Cromer (“Our Town,” “The House of Blue Leaves”) and so well acted by a crackerjack quartet that it goes down easy. Yet the show is built on sand.
Halley Feiffer and Susan Pourfar — both too young for their roles — play Gretchen and Laura, an upper-middle-class couple yearning for a baby.
As obsessed with genetics as any horse breeder, Gretchen has carefully selected her colleague Chuck (Robert Beitzel) to be the unwitting father: He’s nice, handsome and has a terrific daughter (“his genes are proven!”). He’s also conveniently about to move to Florida.
Since Gretchen can’t get pregnant — a bit of info dispatched rather off-handedly — it’s Laura who must have sex with Chuck.
“Nobody’s asking you to watch a difficult French film,” Gretchen reassures her girlfriend. “You do a, a — like a nature activity with another person for a few minutes. Like birding — maybe a little more hands-on.”
Laura gamely throws herself into her mission — which concludes during intermission, so we don’t see her have sex with a dude for the first time ever.
And then Laura’s mother, Dorene (Deborah Rush, hilarious as a silver-coiffed matron with an acid tongue), shows up the morning after.
At his best, Coen mixes farce and old-school New York comedy: adultery, shrink jokes, humor at the Midwest’s expense and overly talkative characters. Nothing new here, but it’s fun.
The problem is that the characters make as little sense as the distracting piano on a platform above the women’s living room.
Most intriguing is the self-deprecating Laura, brought to acerbic life by Pourfar (she was the girlfriend losing her hearing in “Tribes” and portrays an assassin on television’s “Scandal”).
Though Laura is burdened with “an irrational pursuit of honesty,” she becomes involved in a major deception. But we’re not sure why she even agrees to the scheme, because Coen doesn’t ground the love between the women in anything tangible. Writing believable characters is like making a baby: There are key steps you just can’t skip.