Un-Kosher Sleeping Arrangements Prove Endearing

Above all, Moses steals the show here. With her nasal inflection and fluent command of Jewish aphorisms, she has the overbearing neighbor shtick down to a science. Fillmore is also stand-out, morphing with ease into a sugar-high eight-year-old running around the modest stage. Fillmore handily makes a few non-descript stage props feel like an abandoned building-turned-playground. Staging and props in general are never fancy here. Instead, the characters always define the scene, with their pigtails, yarmulkes and overall attitudes doing the work of any fancy prop.

Applying sound bites, digital images and other multimedia, Sleeping Arrangements accurately and effortlessly creates the feel of 1950s Bronx. A fuzzy video image of Lily’s late father, a World War II fighter, is projected against the wall, though the war serves only as a muted backdrop. The faint sounds of a baseball game define the apartment’s proximity to Yankees stadium.

Lighthearted and silly, Sleeping Arrangements also takes some dark turns, inspiring that seasick feeling that only a New Yorker fiction piece can. The eight-year-olds are curious what “it” will be like, role-playing sexual fantasies with a tinge of homoeroticism. The mother-daughter relationship also feels a bit too close at times, though nothing was explicit. But with curiosity at the heart of this production, the characters infuse any potentially predictable, melancholy scene with a kind of down-to-earth innocence.

Sleeping Arrangements runs through Feb 18 at Theater J. Tickets are available online.