The Rafa Play - The Pool - The Flea Theater (4)

The Pool’s “The Rafa Play” – The Flea Theater – Review

The Rafa Play, now playing at the Flea Theater’s new Tribeca home, is a meta comedy about playwright Peter Gil-Sheridan’s imagined romance with professional tennis player Rafael Nadal. Gil-Sheridan, played on-stage by Olli Haaskivi, acknowledges his dual roles as the show’s playwright and lead character from the start with an over-the-top glowing preamble, and the navel-gazing never lets up. I don’t say this to be negative, I say it as a fact. This is a deeply self-involved show.

Washed Up on the Potomac - The Pool - The Flea Theater (5)

The Pool’s “Washed Up on the Potomac” – The Flea Theater – Review

Washed Up on the Potomac, now playing at the Flea Theater’s new Tribeca home, is a dark workplace comedy set in the proofreading office of an ad agency (or possibly purgatory, depending on your interpretation). The show opens with a proofreading disaster in the office, a very obvious and costly mistake on an iPod ad, and the boss is looking for a scapegoat. There is the harried and mousy Sherri (Crystal Finn), who is dominated by her religious fundamentalist mother; Kate (Jennifer Morris), a wannabe rocker who won a songwriting contest at a young age but lost her momentum due to a family tragedy; Mark (Adam Green), a novelist who is so critical of his work that he rewrites the same passage again and again and never finishes anything; and Giorgio (Debargo Sanyal), the office’s self-serious manager who wishes everyone would act a little more professionally.

Tania in the Getaway Van (1) - The Pool - The Flea Theater

The Pool’s “Tania in the Getaway Van” – The Flea Theater – Review

Tania in the Getaway Van, now playing at the Flea Theater’s new Tribeca home, is a coming-of-age story spanning decades and several generations of feminists in the United States, from San Francisco in 1975 to Brooklyn in 2012. Eleven-year-old Laura (Caitlin Morris) is unsure of who she is or what she wants in life, besides watching I Dream of Jeannie with her best friend Stacy (Courtney G. Williams), pretending to be Patty Hearst, and occasionally getting frozen TV dinners when her mother Diane (Annie McNamara) is out late at class. She doesn’t know what to think about her mother going back to school, but she knows that she despises her mother’s assertiveness training and answering her seemingly endless probing questions. Even though her mother insists that there are no wrong answers, Laura worries that her burgeoning feminist mother wouldn’t like it that she really wants to be an heiress and fantasizes about robbing banks.