“A cuckoo clock on an otherwise colorless set is like the gun in Chekhov’s sage observation: It’s just a matter of time before it goes off. The promising yet vexing “Blood In the Sink” opens not with the clock but with the sounds of a shovel digging outside, scraping against something hard and rough. This unnerving noise is echoed in the hostility between young married couple, Tom (Young) and Kate (Lozano). The overwrought drama transpires in their beige kitchen in a bland suburban subdivision, New Essex.

Tom is a blowhard, but he’s not unlikable in his prosaic pompousness; he can’t seem to tell a story without digressing into a Maltin-like description of a movie, and he’s stopped sleeping with his wife (but remains obsessed with who might be). Kate is a skittish and needy hausfrau who spends all day looking at the men digging because spying “turns her crank.” When one of the men, Ricardo (Geoffrey Arend), comes inside to chat, he provides a welcome ethnic and working-class foil for this bourgeois marriage. By the end of the first act, the blood is in the sink, the clock has sounded, and the rumbling noise of the shovel is getting louder and louder. ‘A house can be a dangerous place,’ Tom says to Kate, and this house is definitely not safe. In the second act, some of the dialogue and staging of the first is reprised and revised, with new bells and whistles thrown in to augment the tension between the members of what’s become a love triangle. This postmodern tactic is an interesting structural conceit but offers no insight. Moreover, the characters become trite and disengaged under the weight of stylistic pastiche, so much so that their trials inspire a kind of indifference rather than a real catharsis. The wordplay, the movie banter, the rumbling sink and the constantly cuckooing clock: What feels portentous and heady at first becomes tedious and headache-inducing the second time around. ‘Blood’ would be better if Rubin and Friedman knew when to stop digging.”

Review Blurb: "Blood In the Sink – Award-winning playwright Josh Ben Friedman combines all the necessary elements sex, plumbing, murder and backyard digging – for a riveting evening.”