Oh The Innocents

Betsy sings, Jeremy plays, and Josh watches in this play about love, lies and piano teaching. Jeremy, a young musician who tutors spoiled, rich kids to make ends meet, tells his friend Josh that a student's mother a third rate junior miss Ann Bancroft straight out of The Graduate is being suggestive

Josh is a former musician who has become a sedentary voyeur with a torch of his own. Envious of Jeremy's domestic bliss with Betsy, he urges Jeremy to go forward with the encounter

Betsy, a proof reader by day and a jazz singer by night, is waking up to her husband's and her own restiveness when a smooth record producer offers her a ticket to hear Koko Taylor at the Blue Note while offering Jeremy a trip to the west coast for sound track auditions. Josh, left to protect Betsy against Zev the wolf, suffers a conflict of passion of his own

"A story of young people striving to acquire knowledge of life while remaining true to their values.... It is not unfair to see it as a coupling of Barefoot in the Park with Absolute Beginners , Colin MacInnes' novel about the selling out of the rock 'n roll generation.... [Roth's] eloquent ingenuousness [is] clearly attuned to his generation's drumbeat" ~ Times Union, Rochester