OFF-BROADWAY REVIEW
MY FIRST TIME
Reviewed by Jenny Sandman
Published 2008-08-02
If your first sexual experience was awkward, painful, and ended too quickly, you're not alone. Not by a long shot. My First Time recounts the de-virginization stories of dozens of real people, including some from the audience (usually to hysterical results). It's funny and entertaining in a way that The Vagina Monologues wasn't-it's not political and there isn't a larger moral message. The play is just four actors telling all sorts of stories of first-time sexual experiences.
My First Time is drawn from myfirsttime.com, a website started in 1996 by Peter Foldy and Craig Stuart. Before blogging technically existed, people could share their stories with the world. To date, some 40,000 people from all over the world have written about how they lost their virginity. Four actors tell some of their stories. Like sex itself, the play is poignant, awkward, and often hilarious.
It's not all fun and games-there are some truly terrible stories recounted, of incest, abuse, date rape, and stories of sex that never happened, from socially awkward and frustrated women and men in their forties and beyond. There are the inevitable stories from virgins who are saving it for marriage, from women who didn't really want to do it but finally caved into the pressure, and rarest of all, from two people who are truly in love and ready for sex.
Blue cards are handed out to audience members before every show. Kept entirely anonymous, the cards ask questions like "Are you a virgin?," "What was your partner's name?," and "How would you describe your first time: Incredible, Good, Not Good, Awful." Responses are used at various points during the show (anonymously). There's also a write-in question at the bottom, asking what you would tell your first partner if you could see them today. On the night I attended, those answers ranged from "I love you," to "I wish we'd done it before the wedding.
There wouldn't have been a wedding." The four actors, Kathy Searle, Marcel Simoneau, Dana Watkins and Cydnee Welburn, aren't acting so much as narrating. While they do inhabit their characters, however briefly, the only real interaction is with the audience. The stories are almost all first person, past tense, so it's not a particularly active show. But it doesn't need to be. The transitions between stories are almost instantaneous, and the material is lively and engaging, with occasional statistics or quotations broadcast on a screen behind the actors.
My First Time is guaranteed to get you thinking and talking about your first (and subsequent) times. It's a great play, mostly lighthearted, and one of the most entertaining I've seen. While your first time may not have been all that great, as the saying goes, "You've come a long way, baby."
Click here to buy group tickets.
