"Deceit," a play by Richard Ploetz January 10, 2013

WHERE AND WHEN:
January 10 to 27, 2013
Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (at E. 10th Street)
Presented by Theater for the New City
$15 gen. adm.; Seniors and Students $10
Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM; Sundays at 3:00 PM
Box office (212) 254-1109. www.theaterforthenewcity.net
Running time :90.

"Deceit" (www.deceittheplay.com) is a suspenseful and compelling play by Richard Ploetz that reveals how far some people are willing to take their lies to protect the fragile nature of "being normal." Theater for the New City will present the piece, directed by Andreas Robertz, January 10 to 27 in its Cino Theater.

Still waters run deep throughout this play, whose central character is a handsome everyday husband and father: an investment banker named Frank who sometimes calls himself Bob. As Frank, he plays the role of an ordinary heterosexual married man with an eight year old son. As Bob, he conducts a series of gay love affairs, enabled by Internet dating. His wife Helen, an urbane and sophisticated woman, is surprisingly unaware of his gamesmanship. She is editor of a popular magazine and her reporter, Ken, is researching a blockbuster story about "married men who date other men." Ken's exposé will include secret information from a man he has been interviewing for several weeks, who goes by the name of...Bob. Meanwhile, Bob's lover Jeffrey, a Hermes accessories salesman, cultivates a friendship with Helen that will raise the stakes--and thrill--of the discovery of his relationship with her husband.

As the walls between Frank's separate lives grow increasingly thin, we realize that every adult character in this triangle--or is it pentagon?--is self-deceiving or deceiving others. This must be so, to maintain the compartmentalization upon which the deceit uneasily rests. The play is a symbolic and hard hitting take on extra-marital affairs. It glimpses into the human personality and asks if one can ever be truly oneself in our technology-based society, when Craigslist, Facebook, and Twitter give us facile new identities with artificial user names and profiles. Which side of us is real and which is used to get what we want in the moment?