SFist believes wholeheartedly in supporting the local arts, and when those local arts can also make us laugh (intentional or not), well so much the better. Which is why when we heard the Shelton Theater is currently staging a production of the Christopher Durang play Beyond Therapy, we attended a performance with much eagerness. We remember reading and loving the play back when it was a Broadway hit in the early 1980s, and we remember being shocked at the awfulness of director Robert Altman's 1987 movie version. Thankfully, this local production doesn't fall into that level of adaptation.

While the play was originally written in the 1980s, and retains a certain post-"me generation" sensibility, director Jean Shelton does a good job of updating it by throwing in more current pop culture references, although the protagonists still meet via a newspaper personal ad and not by the expected online match-up. The story focuses on two thirty-somethings, Bruce (Chris Zezza) and Prudence (Lisa Lennox) who meet for a date and then relate their dates to their respective therapists, Mrs. Wallace, (Maureen Williams) and Dr. Framingham, (Lewis Graham). Their therapists are, to say the least, a tad unconventional, as is the fact that the personal ad-placing Bruce has a live-in lover named Bob (Matt Martinez.)