Review: 'My First Ex-Husband" Delivers Big Laughs in Sag Harbor, Moves to WHBPAC for One-Night-Only

On opening night, Joy Behar’s new play at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor got the kind of laughs comedy writers dream about. We’re talking big, prolonged cackles, howls, snorts and guffaws – not the polite titters some shows have to settle for.

My First Ex-Husband, which debuted Off-Broadway earlier this year, is not only very, very funny. It also has plenty to say about love, sex and relationships – particularly relationships that end in divorce.

After a weeklong run at Bay Street that ended on July 19, the show is slated for a one-night-only performance at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center this Saturday, August 2.

Structured similarly to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues – a show Behar appeared in during its Off-Broadway run – My First Ex-Husband features four cast members who take turns reading short vignettes/monologues from a lectern in the middle of the stage.

Behar, who is best known as a longtime co-host of ABC’s The View and an outspoken advocate for progressive causes, adapted the monologues from a series of interviews she conducted with divorced women who were willing to open up about their experiences. The fact that the bizarrely entertaining characters we meet over the course of 90 minutes and eight vignettes are actually walking around in the real world somewhere only adds to the show’s power.

All eight of the stories are told from an overwhelmingly female perspective. There are no men on stage, nor did Behar choose to include a narrative from a male perspective. For that reason, the male characters – though vividly drawn via their ex-spouse’s accounts – are presented as something of a rogues gallery. The show introduces us to sex addicts, cross dressers, low-level gangsters, adulterers, failed actors and religious zealots, all through the eyes of the women who used to love them.

The female characters, who tell their stories in the first-person, are much more sympathetic than the men – a baked-in result of the way the play is structured. But the girls don’t exactly walk away from the proceedings unscathed. They lie, they cheat, they covet and they sometimes think very bad thoughts and do very bad things. In other words, they behave like flesh-and-blood human beings.

While it’s no raunchier than a lot of today’s theater, be forewarned that My First Ex-Husband is decidedly not G-rated. A little randiness only adds to the show’s appeal for the non-Puritanical among us, but if you’re disturbed by contemplating, say, the difference between a spritzer and a pumper, or the pros and cons of hairless pudenda, you might want to skip this particular production.

The Bay Street Theater cast, which includes Behar herself, former soap opera diva Susan Lucci and veteran comedic actors Jackie Hoffman and Veanne Cox, all reprise roles they first performed as part of the Off-Broadway cast during the show’s premiere run.

Like The Vagina Monologues, the production is designed for cast members to rotate in and out. Other Off-Broadway co-stars to date have included Susie Essman, Tovah Feldshuh, Adrienne C. Moore, Judy Gold, Marsha Mason and Julia Sweeney. Look for more women to join the formidable roster of cast members as the show continues its run in venues across the country later this year.

All four current cast members acquit themselves well. Performing her own material, Behar’s on-stage style is fairly no-frills and straightforward, but with killer comedic timing – no surprise given her roots as a stand-up comedian. And Lucci gamely takes on a Brooklyn accent in one vignette and a Southern accent in another.

But Jackie Hoffman and Veanne Cox, both of whom are no strangers to Broadway, deliver many of the show’s best moments. As only seasoned stage actors can, Hoffman and Cox positively inhabit their characters, elevating Behar’s script in the process.

Hoffman is both uproariously funny and genuinely poignant as a young Orthodox Jewish woman in Brooklyn. Her character struggles to deal with an arranged marriage and the idiosyncrasies and conflicts that inevitably arise when a patriarchal culture steeped in thousands of years of tradition collides with the sensibilities of a modern woman. And then of course, there’s the whole Orthodox wig thing.

Wigs also inform the travails of Hoffman’s other extremely memorable character. Without inserting too many spoilers, suffice it to say that this vignette centers on women’s clothes, makeup and hairpieces not necessarily worn by biological women.

Wigs appear yet again (are we noticing a pattern here?) in Cox’s best vignette. Insecure and suffering from low self-esteem exacerbated by an affliction known as alopecia universalis that causes complete head-to-toe hairlessness, Cox’s heroine finds it very difficult to meet men. When she falls for a dude who turns out to be a shameless lothario, a combination of buyer’s remorse and neurosis all but swallows her whole.

Cox’s relentless energy is a perfect match for a character who typifies most of the women in Behar’s show. They’re no angels – not by a long shot. But most of them probably don’t deserve to be saddled with the men they married. Ultimately, you find yourself rooting for them.

The fact that they’re incredibly funny certainly doesn’t hurt.

For tickets to the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center show on August 2, visit whbpac.org.