L to R): JULIANNE CARPENTER, SHELLEY McPHERSON, DEE DEE FRIEDMAN, and ASHLEY ANDERSON photo by Jim Baldassare

Immediately, you know Kathryn Chetkovich, the playwright, is in the process of learning the craft of shaping a play and she has a long way to go. As for why this play is created this way, she is at the stage of finding the difference between what she thinks she is saying and what is actually there on the stage. Somehow, it all sums up in the last few words in which the central character, Claire – or what will be the central character some day --, intelligent, attractive, still deeply enmeshed in her feminist rituals of twenty years ago - begins to discover that she is everything she didn’t want to be and doesn’t know if she can change. That happens to be a real, dramatic challenge to present and an opportunity for Chetkovich. Otherwise, she’s got a soap, soap characters, soap situations at best, a nod-er at worst. There isn’t a single character you haven’t seen before. Or situation. True, this can be stated as deliberate choice but wake up and look around: what is a playwright’s goal? It cannot be just self expression or any other self indulgence; it has a definite end to attain: to engage an audience. And to get there, your play has to find actual representation in the actors playing the characters you have pulled out of your imagination and put on the page saying all those clever things, which, just as easily, are turned into dross by the way the actors attack them. Then, when those actors have also to invest themselves, they have to behave, say, do, imply, extend, withhold, enrich the people who are now on the stage, all of them being guided by the director, who may have a vision, an inclination, a plan which does not enhance the playwright’s own, or even match it.

Something like that has occurred here. Director Peter Sylvester has cast his women acutely and his men off the mark. Chetkovitch wants to contrast a woman of today with the women of a generation ago? Fine. She has created Coco. Where can these generations meet frequently? A gym, sure, but in this case, a bar. Where Coco is a cocktail waitress. Ashley Anderson, drop dead gorgeous as Coco, makes total sense as a character in good part because she works with her fellow actors so directly she doesn’t try any stage tricks at all. Refreshingly honest. The three forty-somethings, old friends from back in their days at the women’s’ college (women’s’ college?!!) where Claire still works, presumably meet here. Oh? Why, to discuss their lives. Nina (DeeDee Friedman) is still profoundly devoted to her feminist causes and her feminist tribe she discovered in college twenty-some years ago. Friedman could easily have played her stridently, stereotypically, but has found a better line, a blasé, amused bitterness that leaps for clichés to chew on. Jamie (Shelley McPherson), evasive, uncertain, is the focal point of the troubles, in the midst of a divorce, and feeling betrayed because Claire has seriously taken up with Dan (she’s pregnant and forty), the brother of Jamie’s soon to be ex-husband. Claire, irritatingly, all over the place, trying to hang on to the old girl ties and to be true to her new husband-to-be, makes the mess of things that is bound to happen. If only we cared. Dan (Tim Berdik), Claire’s new man sets your teeth on edge in a nasty little, unbelievable scene teasing his wife- to- be about the large imponderables over some ice cream. Ross (Mark Hofmaier), Dan’s brother, Jamie’s ex-husband in process, keeps looking at the audience, is somewhere in space, not connected to his words.

Are both men supposed to be the enemy? As Nina sees all males? If you cast and play that line, you get one result, not far from what playwright Chetkovich has in front of her now. If, on the other hand, you cast and play the reverse with your male characters, more sympathy, more understanding, you have the makings of a more involving dynamic, which shapes Claire into a more complex character that lifts her out of the pallor she now inhabits. And, then, of course, you engross an audience, hopefully. The story details? In the title. She said drunken brawl. She (another one) said rape, piling on. She (still another) blabbed it and we have a Situation. But not a play. Set designer Mark Symczak has been most ingenious on a dime.

Workshop Theater, 312 West 36^th Street. Tickets: 212-352-3101. $18. TDF accepted. Wed-Sat 8 pm.