There’s good theater and then there’s good attempts at theater. But there are also those rare occasions that a good theater makes a good attempt at a plain bad production; a good example of this is Sex Marks the Spot, a new political comedy by Charles Grippo.

The play attempts to delve into the seedy world of political sex scandals and, based upon an interview with Grippo, illuminate the rarely seen point-of-view of the politician’s wife. Unfortunately for this play, it fails to even cast a flicker of light on either point, and lacks the character development, humor, and plot that would have made the 2 hour play bearable.

Sex Marks the Spot opens up on the incumbent Senator Clooney on the eve of a debate against his challenger, a notorious porn star named Desiree Le Bonque. But to our surprise, or lack thereof, Miss Le Bonque is the Senator’s mistress and threatens to reveal their affair on national television if the Senator does not agree to marry her. The Senator drugs the porn star, a recurring theme throughout the play, and attempts to hide the evidence from his loyal band of idiot supporters. From the nervous, and profusely sweaty campaign manager, to the secretly beautiful yet-disguised-as-frumpy press secretary, these characters are a dime a dozen and lack any real emotional development that would make this play seem realistic.

The play goes downhill from there as the audience is subjected to witless one-liners and commonplace dialogue that a young playwright typically learns to avoid in eighth grade journalism. While the play is supposed to “investigate what goes on ‘behind the scenes’” in the world of political scandals and lascivious affaires, the playwright fails to touch on any of these issues. The characters never come face to face with one another, ironically missing one another by the opening and closing of a door. The characters are horribly stereotyped to the point of boredom; from an overweight hotel security guard eating donuts and lacking any brain power to the nosy journalist trying to get his next big scoop.

And what is severely lacking is Grippo’s so-called focal point of the play, wanting to illuminate the thoughts and feelings of the spouse of the adulterer. The Senator’s wife has approximately ten minutes of stage time in which she rarely expresses any real thought of emotion and is stumbling about it a drug-induced stupor, hardly leaving her any room to develop emotionally.

Sex Marks the Spot was neither funny nor witty, the audience hardly laughed once, making this a far cry from a farce or a comedy. It relied far too heavily on stereotypes and endless run-on jokes and the ham actors did nothing to enhance the enjoyment or the entertainment of this play. Overall, the play lacks the humor and cleverness to be a farce, and the real world familiarity to be a satire.