Carla Gugino (left) and Caroline Aaron play friends who strategize about getting into private school in “A Kid Like Jake.” (Erin Maiano)
Greg and Alex are a happily married Manhattan couple with a 4-year-old son. Jake is smart, creative — and he loves pretending to be a princess.
“We’ve got seven different Cinderella DVDs,” Alex (Carla Gugino) reminds her husband (Peter Grosz), who seems unfazed. “The Disney version, the Rodgers and Hammerstein, even the one with Brandy.”
They aren’t worried about Jake’s taste for sequined gowns — until it’s time to send him to preschool.
The first half of Daniel Pearle’s polished new dramedy “A Kid Like Jake” is dominated by Greg and Alex’s efforts to get their son — whom we never see — into a private school. Alex, who quit her job as a lawyer to be a full-time mom, plans every detail like Dwight D. Eisenhower mapping Allied movements in WWII.
Considering the fierce competition from equally gung-ho families, she’s got her work cut out for her, including prepping Jake for interviews and agonizing over his test scores.
Alex’s friend Judy (Caroline Aaron), who runs a school, suggests bringing up Jake’s “gender-variant play” in the application essay.
“Let’s be honest, Jake is very special,” Judy says. “I think you might be able to capitalize on it. Because they’re looking for kids — and families — that stand out.”
Gugino and Aaron are a lot of fun to watch in those scenes, each one making the most of a distinctive voice — the first’s low and sexy, the second’s a smoker’s rasp. It’s also nice to see the vibrant Gugino in a new play, since her previous stage work had been in revivals like “After the Fall” and “Desire Under the Elms.”
You only wish Pearle had given them chewier material. The subject is sensitively handled — maybe too sensitively. This is a common issue with LCT3, a company that seems to increasingly focus on “issue plays” like this one and the 2013 Pulitzer winner “Disgraced,” about religion and politics.
Still, the show, smoothly directed by Evan Cabnet, is full of perceptive details about the intense world of affluent parenting, where every child is gifted and the struggle for dominance begins at home.
After Greg takes Jake out for fast food, Alex explodes. “Childhood associations are incredibly powerful,” she tells him. “If he associates McDonald’s with breaking Mommy’s rules, it’s gonna enhance the experience and his whole life he’s gonna crave it.”
Guess Big Macs won’t figure in Jake’s application — in this world, they’re more damning for a boy than being obsessed with Cinderella.