MIDDLEBURY — Just in case your Valentine’s Day is a little bland, the Cutting Edge Staged Reading Series promises to heat things up with “The Mystery of Love and Sex” by Bathsheba Doran this Sunday. This show kicks off the series’ 2019 season. 
From the writer of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” and Showtime’s “Masters of Sex” comes a tender and funny story about love in all its forms, and that blurry space between friendship, romance and erotic desire. “The Mystery of Love and Sex” is also about families; the family we are born into and the family we create.
She’s white; he’s black. She’s Jewish, he’s Christian. Charlotte and Jonny, best friends since they were nine are now exploring a more intimate relationship. What that means can be complicated — for them and for her parents who have their own issues.  “The Mystery of Love and Sex” looks at secrets, race, the fluidity of identity and family dynamics.
Directed by Rebecca Strum, the cast includes Geeda Searfoorce, Ben Ash, Alexis De Larosa and Becca Berlind; Frankie Dunleavy will read stage directions.
When the play ran in New York in 2015 at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater Charles Isherwood of the New York Times wrote: “‘The Mystery of Love & Sex’ is written with such compassion, such wry wisdom about the vicissitudes of loving attachments, that I emerged from the theater into yet another frigid day feeling warmed from within.”
Mark your calendars for this boundary-pushing play that speaks to our contemporary moment: Sunday, Feb. 17, 4 p.m., in the Byers Studio at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury. Refreshments and a talkback follow the performance. $10 donation encouraged. Adult content: not recommended for children under the age of 16.
Two free tickets to Middlebury Actor’s Workshop’s April full main stage production of “Ada And The Engine” will be given away at this staged reading.