By Jenny Sandman

Bill Dawes, Cyndee Welburn & Josh Heine in My First Time

If your first sexual experience was awkward, painful, and ended too quickly, you're not alone. Not by a long shot.

My First Time recounts the de-virginization stories of dozens of real people, including some from the audience. Four actors telli all sorts of stories of first-time sexual experiences. There's no political orlarger moral message as in The Vagina Monologues, but it's funnier and more entertaining.

The piece is drawn from myfirsttime.com, a website started in 1998 by Peter Foldy and Craig Stuart. Before blogging technically existed, people could share their stories with the world. To date, some 40,000 people from all over the world have written about how they lost their virginity. Like sex itself, the play forged from these stories is poignant, awkward, and often hilarious.

It's not all fun and games, however. There are some truly terrible stories recounted— incest, abuse, date rape, sex that never happened for socially awkward frustrated women and men in their forties and beyond. There are also the inevitable stories from virgins who are saving it for marriage, from women who didn't really want to do it but finally caved in to pressure and, rarest of all, from two people who are truly in love and ready for sex.

Blue cards are handed out to audience members before every show. Cards that are kept entirely anonymous ask questions like: "Are you a virgin?". . ."What was your partner's name?". . ." Would you describe your first time as Incredible, Good, Not Good, Awful". Responses are used at various points during the show (again, anonymously). There's also a write-in question at the bottom, asking what you would tell your first partner if you could see him or her today. On the night I attended, those answers range from "I still think of you every day, forty years later," to "Does your wife know you still sleep with men?"

Bill Dawes, Josh Heine, Kathy Searle and Cydnee Welburn, aren't acting so much as narrating. While they do inhabit their characters, however briefly, the only real interaction is with the audience. The stories are almost all first person, past tense, so it's not a particularly active show. But it doesn't need to be. The transitions between stories are almost instantaneous, and the material is lively and engaging. Occasionally statistics or quotations are broadcast on a screen behind the actors (usually to the audience's great amusement).

My First Time is guaranteed to get you thinking and talking about your first (and subsequent) times. I wouldn't recommend it for a first date, but otherwise, it's great fun and one of the most entertaining plays I've seen this year. While your first time may not have been all that great, as the saying goes, "You've come a long way, baby." and this show is ultimately about setting out on that rocky but rewarding road to adulthood.

My First Time Written and Directed by Ken Davenport With Bill Dawes, Josh Heine, Kathy Searle and Cydnee Welburn Production Design: Matthew A. Smith Running Time: Eighty minutes, no intermission New World Stage, 340 West 50th Street; 212-239-6200 Thursday to Saturday @ 8pm. From 7/12/07 to 1/05/08; opening 7/28/07. Tickets $25 to $59. Reviewed by Jenny Sandman based on July 27th performance