Drama That’s Skin Deep : There is little more to Michael Solomon’s ‘Adam and Eva Marie’ than two stick figures.

Although the unethical implications of the situation are never thoroughly gone into, psychologist Adam meets hooker Eva Marie at a party, and they decide to trade services. He needs sex, and she needs therapy.

That’s all there is to the plot of Michael Solomon’s “Adam and Eva Marie” at Woodland Hills’ Center Stage. That is, unless Eva Marie’s later pregnancy by Adam is a dramatic thunderbolt to a naive audience.

Naivete is the salient feature of playwright-director Solomon’s effort. Press material says the “philosophical comedy loosely comments on the Genesis theme.” That is as pretentious, and misleading, as some of Solomon’s writing.

Very little happens between the protagonists. They bed together. He listens to her story of child abuse and molestation by her father and her hatred of her mother. In her bedroom, when he’s not under the covers, Adam also goes through a sort of simplistic self-therapy, which results in his addressing the audience from a soapbox about various subjects that have nothing to do with the play, such as diet programs (all of which are evil), bad analysts and TV ads.

Without these excesses, it would be a very short play. It’s odd that Solomon, whose program credits say he has been a practicing psychotherapist for a quarter of a century, doesn’t get much below the skin of his characters, never once exposing the machinery that makes them work. They remain stick figures.

As director, he moves the action brightly enough, but only the performances of his actors give any roundness to the pair. William H. Bassett adds a bit of a fillip to his Adam by allowing him to appear as somewhat of a cluck, and Donna Kay Meek has abundant energy and gives Eva Marie some interesting shadings. They don’t have much to work with.

WHERE AND WHEN

* What: “Adam and Eva Marie.”

* Location: Center Stage, 20929 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills.

* Hours: 8 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Ends Jan. 29.

* Price: $12.50.

* Call: (818) 904-0444.