KITCHEN PARTY

Welcome to suburbia, ground zero. Scott's uptight, upper-middle-class parents will be away for the night, sipping cocktails with some friends in a soulless new housing development (“Amberdale”) nearly indistinguishable from an adjacent golf course. Dad puts their 18-year-old son on notice: Scott can have friends over, but no mess, no carousing, not so much as a single peach-colored carpet fiber out of place. Accordingly, Scott's young pals congregate in the kitchen or on the patio, for rounds of gossip about school, their future plans, the disposition of Scott's unseen older brother Steve, but most of all, about their impossible mothers and fathers. Meanwhile, the tippling grownups bemoan the shortcomings, real and imagined, of their kids. Does it sound enough like a ticking bomb waiting to go off? By the time both parties let out nobody's life will be the same, in Gary Burns' state-of-the-angst dark comedy of Baby Boomer values, vices, vapidity and the children that have had to cope with it all.