New Yorker fiction pieces can be predictably melancholy. Sample plot: the narrator discovers a personality flaw, or flaw in her love life – “flaw” is the key word here—and the reader is left feeling seasick by the end. Luckily, a few amusing anecdotes have slipped into print along the way, and Theatre J has adapted some of these collected memoirs by Laura Shaine Cunningham into Sleeping Arrangements. Pain, failure, and all things deserving self-pity are still just-as-involved, but the play also allows comedy and tragedy to hold hands onstage.

What begins as a sweet mother-daughter story in the vein of “Gilmore Girls,” featuring a hip, still young-at-heart single mother Rosie (Becky Peters) and her eight-year-old Lily (Tessa Klein), quickly turns tragic. Rosie dies anti-climactically after about just twenty minutes of stage time, and Lily is left with two oddball bachelor uncles (David Elias and Paul Morella), her precocious playmates (Tiffany Fillmore and Lindsay Haynes) and an overbearing, nitpicky neighbor Mrs. Hassan (a very convincing Susan Moses). It is in the characterization of these figures where the play shines the most. A few actors double up, or pose as dramatically younger and older ages, but it never feels forced.