Josh Sadowski and Amanda Seyfried

Labeling the playwright Neil LaBute a misogynist long ago became a reflex among theater writers. “Neil LaBute’s sexist ‘Pig,’” ran the headline of a 2008 Guardian piece about his play Fat Pig. “Mention LaBute's name to some of my friends over coffee,” wrote The Guardian’s Maxie Szalwinska, “and they spit bile across the table, along with bits of their breakfast bun.” That sounds unpleasant. Better find some new friends.

In remaking the 1973 film The Wicker Man in 2006, “LaBute poisoned its well with an old familiar misogyny,” decreed The Village Voice’s Michael Atkinson. Those who offered a different take, such as John Simon, who rechristened the writer “LaBrute” in New York magazine, often declared LaBute misanthropic instead.

LaBute has certainly explored some dark characters and themes in his plays and films. But why, I wondered as the audience filed into a performance of The Way We Get By (at the Second Stage Theatre on West 43rd Street through June 21), were so many groups of young women present? Weren’t they supposed to be LaBute’s enemies?

It turns out that LaBute has softened his tone considerably, and his latest is a lightly pleasing romantic comedy – a chick flick for the stage. This gratifying genre has, in recent years, largely been abandoned by Hollywood in favor of more youth-friendly gross-out comedies, so it feels agreeably revanchist for LaBute to reclaim the territory of frisky relationship comedies. Those who were disturbed by such caustic LaBute works as the films In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends and Neighbors (1998) would never guess the new play comes from the same source. It’s a breezy, sweet, even hopeful two-hander, though what is most surprising about it may be how formulaic it is. It isn’t a challenging night of theater, and that’s just fine.

Thomas Sadoski, a boyish actor best known for HBO’s The Newsroom who is about to turn 39 but could pass for 25, plays a hesitant fellow named Doug whom we meet as he slinks out of the bedroom of a tidy New York City apartment in the middle of the night. He looks nervous, even ashamed, as he drinks a bottle of water and wanders around the flat. After a few minutes, he is joined onstage by the adorable Amanda Seyfried as Beth, who tracks him around the space as the two make awkward conversation. The two have just had sex for the first time, but it’s not clear how well they know each other.  Teasing out the details of their history is LaBute’s chief business in the play, and as he gradually dispenses clues the play maintains a comic balance that seems equally likely to tip over into catastrophe or bliss for the pair.

The actors have a lot of fun with LaBute’s dialogue, which is full of misdirection and unforced comedy. Early on, there’s some chatter about the T-shirt Doug was wearing earlier in the evening, later discarded on a chair and put on by Beth when she gets out of bed. It’s a vintage Star Wars top signed by Kenny Baker (the actor who played R2-D2), and Doug worries inordinately about its preservation and well-being, much to Beth’s understandable exasperation. Is it his emotional immaturity, then, that’s causing the rift between him and Beth? No, that would be a little too easy for LaBute, though the failings of men are something of a specialty of his. The play depends on our readiness for the clichés of the genre but then upends expectations: Though it seems in the early going that Doug is looking for a way to sneak out of the apartment without waking Beth, or that after she gets up he’d like to find the most passive and cowardly way to slink away from this one-nighter without causing too much turmoil, his reluctance to commit isn’t the problem either.

LaBute is withholding a secret from us, and in the second half, after the big “reveal,” as the Hollywood types call it, the piece lose some of its tension. There is a reason why these two cuties are so jittery around each other, but upon reflection it seems an obstacle that is relatively easily overcome. This is 2015, after all, and the couple’s secret isn’t illegal or even immoral but merely an oddity. Yet LaBute credibly manages the difficulty of the situation as perceived by Doug, and also devises for the closing minutes a grand gesture straight out of a Katherine Heigl movie.

Before we get to that point, as LaBute makes clear in teasing banter, hesitation, pauses, and doleful looks, the couple’s problem is quite simple: They’re in love. Though their sexual encounter at first seems to the audience like something casual and barely-considered, it’s anything but. Doug and Beth aren’t each other’s hookup or conquest, they’re soul mates, and though the prospect seems absurd to them given their past history, they yearn for commitment to each other, even if neither dares mention it. LaBute runs no risk whatsoever of being called “edgy” or “incendiary.” If he’s turning into the new Neil Simon, no complaints he

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