By Jonathan Mandell
Special to DNAinfo
UPPER WEST SIDE — As she hung around with other mothers at the Central Park playground, the 79th Street boat basin and local child-friendly restaurants, Anna Fishbeyn observed that the conversations focused on three subjects: how to get kids to go to sleep, whether pre-school was adequately preparing children for first grade, and…sex.
Out of this realization has come "Sex in Mommyville," Fishbeyn’s first play, a one-woman show that she will be performing from August 18th to August 29th at The Flea Theater in TriBeCa.
Fishbeyn wrote the play with music as a fictionalized account of one woman’s effort to find time for sex with her husband despite the competing demands from the couple’s two pre-school children, the husband’s job as a lawyer, and the persistent presence of the main character’s mother, who lives in an apartment two flights upstairs.
Fishbeyn gives the audience fair warning early on in the play that it will skew more X-rated than G-rated by announcing, "They say you're supposed to write what you know: so I'll start with me — me as your first chapter of a mother in heat!"
Fishbeyn's main character lists the places she and her fictional husband have had sex romps — including a "terrace on top of a fancy New York restaurant, which shall remain nameless."
We "were just your average, normal, horny couple. And here's the thing: we still are except that now we have children and sex has become a militarized obstacle course," she adds.
Fishbeyn plays all the members of the family, a new turn for the aspiring writer (she has been at work on a novel for six years) and academic (she has a PhD in literature from Columbia) who hasn’t been on stage since she was a child actress in Russia. Her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was nine years old.
Fishbeyn knows well the life of a Manhattan mother — the temptation to use sugar as bribe, the fear that giving in to her daughter’s wish to see the entertaining "Max and Ruby" video rather than the educational "LeapFrog" video might hinder her chances of getting into Harvard.
She also knows from her chats with the other mothers that their attention is not entirely on their children. Some obsess with getting back into shape after giving birth; others eye good-looking men who pass by. She herself owns up to a hatred for her husband’s "mistress," his Blackberry.
"I have threatened to flush her down the toilet," Fishbeyn said, drinking cappuccino in Le Pain Quotidien on 72nd Street, while her six-year-old daughter was attending a summer theater workshop at the Kaufman Center and her two-year-old son was having a nap with Grandma.
Fishbeyn admits to other parallels between her family and her play. Both husbands (Fishbeyn’s and the one in the play) cook gourmet meals, with the real-life unintended consequence of turning the daughter off to all but the best meals. Her daughter refuses to eat pizza and dismisses hamburgers as "fake meat", insisting on calamari and Branzino when they go out to restaurants.
"My kids won’t eat things that aren’t properly spiced," Fishbeyn said. "One thing they will eat, thank the Lord, is a hot dog."
As busy as she was as a mother, wife and writer, she is overwhelmed to be adding performer to the mix. There has been one sweet benefit, she said. To be more efficient, she too has gotten a Blackberry.
"Now my husband says ‘Put your Blackberry away, I’m talking to you,’" Fishbeyn said. "I think he uses it less than I do now."
