Kissing

 Set in New York's Central Park, Kissing is a world premiere at New Theater in Coral Gables that has a lot to do with a man's midlife crisis and his flirtation with a younger woman. It's hard not to think of Woody Allen – there's even a bit about lobsters. And there's some similarity to "Groundhog Day." And at some point the mind wanders and you find yourself recalling the moment in "Moonstruck" when Olympia Dukakis tells the John Mahoney character, "You're a little boy and you like to be bad."

Actually, Sam, the character in Kissing, is an insurance fraud investigator who'd like to be Jacques Cousteau. He makes his first entrance walking loudly down New Theater's center aisle in yellow flippers, a red knit cap a la Cousteau, and tight baby-blue kids' pajamas. Sitting on the lip of the stage, he relates his boyhood Cousteau obsession.

Long married to Helen, he's now obsessed with Tess, a claims adjuster in his office who as a girl wanted to be a ballet dancer. She's now dating grad student Andrew, but that doesn't stop her from sharing occasional illicit kisses with Sam, either in the office or at the company softball game, which is where most of the play is set. The rest of the time we're in another part of the park, where Helen bumps into Andrew, who has been sucking on a red lollipop and waxing almost poetic about a one-night stand and Rodin's "The Kiss."

The action mostly involves Sam (played with sonority by Larry Buzzeo) trying to persuade Tess (Jessa Thomas) that their relationship should be more serious than it is now and that they should go away together. She's cool to the idea; by now she recognizes all his "tones," likens him to a vampire trying to suck away a little of her youth and is tired of his predictable wardrobe of pleated khakis and oxford shirt, which he's wearing to watch the game. So the Cousteau wannabe goes splashing about in a nearby fountain and returns – repeatedly and at indeterminate intervals – to ask Tess how it's going. "We're losing to Metropolitan Life" is invariably the sly answer.

This is all rather chilly, but Kissing warms up when Helen meanders onto the stage and encounters Andrew.

Barbara Sloan delivers a nuanced Helen, and Kyle A. Thomas turns Andrew from an apparently callow young man to one of surprising empathy. For their scenes, Caisley -- who has had work produced at, among other places, the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia and Actors Theater of Louisville -- forgoes the tricks that mark the Sam-Tess sequences.

It's a tough balancing act. When Sam and Tess kiss before a canvas painted with hard-edged shades of green to denote trees, a recorded voiceover reads from reference books about the physiology of kissing; later, Andrew stands near a camelback park bench and delivers a paean to Rodin's curvaceous "The Kiss."