old friends, new friends, friends you haven’t met yet. Friends the TV show. Frenemies. acquaintances. No matter the words you use, social stuff is pretty tricky. For some folks. As a long-time sufferer of Social Anxiety Disorder with severe Intimacy Issues and great difficulty sustaining long-term, meaningful and productive relationships either friend-wise or intimate, (just witness the trail of once-friends, now acquaintances i left in my wake) – I totally understand the premise of Larry Kunofsky’s What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends and could identify, mostly, I think, with the lead character Enid, who is a constant awkward outcast, lower-case “friend” to a small cultish group of “Friends” (capital F) who rate each other with a point system and have fabulous secret hot-tub parties and group showers.

Larry and director Jacob Krueger are friends of mine, Amy Staats who plays Enid is too, kind of. We were in Hell House together. Todd D’Amour feels like he should be my friend since I run into him pretty frequently and kind of know him from around. I don’t know anyone else in the cast but I could imagine them being my friends too.

Anyway, long story short, I’ve been taking a bit of a break from the experimental world to just kind of relax my mind and focus on other stuff for awhile. Like Feeder, What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends, is not experimental, but it is well-written and pretty darn zippy. Its funny, well-paced and enjoyable. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, it has some nice emotional moments and all in all is a darn good time in the theater.

Personally, I was mostly psyched by the performers. All of them were great but since Todd and Amy were the only ones I had seen previously, they were the ones I focused on. It was nice to be able to see these two downtown stalwarts get to flex their muscles (in the case of Todd, quite literally) and show off their mainstream acting chops.  They’re both great comic actors and are just a pleasure to watch. Carrie Keranen, Susan Louise O’Connor and Josh Lefkowitz all do great work in a whole mess of different parts. Very funny, all of them. It is amazing how satisfying it is to watch talented stage actors rather than famous people (or children of famous people) who have no stage presence whatsoever.

Maybe not the right show for a hardcore downtown crowd, but its definitely a great show for a date or something – and at $18 its a darn good deal! So take a friend. Or a  Friend.