A Perfect Couple

Are you rapidly approaching 40, locked into an engagement, but still seeing yourself as a postcollegiate slacker? If so, you’ll feel right at home with three fourths of the characters in Brooke Berman’s bright relationship dramedy, A Perfect Couple. Armed with her customary flair for brainy-yet-heartfelt banter and an anthropologist’s eye for social mechanics, Berman charts the alliances of aging friends with abutting emotional histories.

Amy (Dana Eskelson) is the pert, assertive fiancée of Isaac (James Waterston), a photographer who half-gamely allows himself to be bossed around. Staying with this engaged pair at their country fixer-upper is a mutual friend, the defiant singleton Emma (Annie McNamara, frisky yet bruised). Recent Bard College grad Josh (Elan Moss-Bachrach) hangs around to provide youthful counterpoint and—after Amy begins to suspect romance between Isaac and Emma—a shoulder to cry on.

At 75 minutes, A Perfect Couple is a lean short story of a play, more than a sketch but less than a hefty drama. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; even within this modest frame, Berman raises several rich themes—loneliness, sexless infidelity, Gen Xers versus Gen Yers, gender roles and the awful mutability of love. It ends on a suspended note of resigned ambiguity, as Amy and Emma wonder what will become of their tarnished friendship. The perfect couple, Berman might be suggesting, never consummates the affair.