Deborah Salem Smith’s Faithful Cheaters features bears, a magical fidelity drug, and six characters who all talk a lot but mostly mishear one another. Coming on the heels of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this similarly woodsy farce eschews depth in favor of laughs. Married Polly (Rebecca Gibel) and Theo (Stephen Thorne) are hoping to buy a ramshackle getaway in northern Michigan, but in order to do that they’ll need money from Polly’s two moms (Anne Scurria and Karen MacDonald). They’re mostly overworked – Polly is a doctor while Theo and mom Nance work for drug companies – but life’s not a beach when people need their phones confiscated in order to stop working. When two unexpected dudes appear, the hijinks go into overdrive. The adultery stuff seems very pedestrian; the mild jabs at Big Pharma were more interesting. It’s fluffy fun. The only real misstep is a quick demonstration of what to do when a bear attacks. That’s been done before, and way more crazily.
Faithful Cheaters
