Girls' Sports

Boston playwright Emily Kaye Lazzaro has created a sharply etched portrait of a family in disarray as seen through the eyes of the 16-year-old daughter. The fresh Ink Theatre Company production of the play "Girls' Sports" is nimble and apt, and a fine finish to the company's season.

The daughter's name is Samantha (Melody Martin) -- Sam for short. She might have a tomboyish name, but she's not interested in sports, except of the hormonal sort; when Sam's not working feverishly to maintain her grade point average, she's fantasizing, in detail, about the boys she'd like to kiss.

Her unemployed father, Robert (David Marino), is a Homer Simpson type: Ineffectual, easily distracted, weak-willed and generally aimless. (I swear he actually says "D'oh!" once or twice.) Somehow, Robert has taken it into his head to become a defender the Title IX, a law from the 1970s that ensures equality of access to girls for sports and other opportunities. It's a law that's under constant attack from the boys' club world of athletics, and even though Sam isn't an athlete, Robert wants to ensure that she has every opportunity available to her that she might wish to take.

Mysteriously, Robert himself has had an opportunity present itself in the form of an affair with a local newspaper reporter named Lillian (Jenny Reagan). The source of the attraction isn't clear, but Lillian has issues of her own; she's thin skinned to the point of pathology, and able to hear contempt and dismissal in any offhand remark.

She and the perpetually dithering Robert make as much sense, romantically, as a fish in a basket of roses, but by the same token they carry a realistic air of absurdity. If they were actually meant to be together, they'd be one of those wildly mismatched couples (everybody seems to know at least one).

But they aren't meant to be together, and one suspects even Robert knows it. Lillian's desperate clinging is complicated by Sam's deduction that her father is sleeping with Lillian. Being a take-charge sort, Sam makes it her business to whip her father into line. She has the force of will to do it, too, but she lacks the maturity to do it graciously; it's not long before she's practically blackmailing Robert.

Susan (Holly Newman) -- Robert's wife -- is too busy worrying over work and money to notice any of this. Speaking of mismatched couples, Susan is decisive and organized, in contrast to her husband. She's also rather binary: Things are black and white for her, and when changes come, they take place in a quantum manner, all at once, without crossing any intervening distance.

Putting these characters together, with their combination of frailties, is a certain recipe for comedy and drama alike. Lazzaro focuses on the comedy, which is to this play's credit. Jeffey Mosser's brisk direction is a good pairing for this material, and Marc T. Ewart's scenic design is a complex and detailed bit of work that sees elements emerging and unfolding like a Rubik's cube or a pop-up book.

Ian W. King handles the lighting and does fine work, while whoever chose the music (no sound designer is credited) got the choices exactly right.

Lazzaro is also an actor, and in "Girls' Sports" she gives all the characters interesting arcs, tart lines and juicy bits of business. The cast has a fine time with the material, and gives incandescent and precisely calibrated performances. They do the heavy lifting, which leaves us in the audience the happy task of taking it in and enjoying every minute.