little creatures.

Played by Penelope Gioris, Kate is an adult whose manner is childlike, even for a kindergarten teacher. She is relentlessly wide-eyed, displaying the kind of exaggerated wonderment that quickly becomes annoying. She meets a rather promising beau, Tom (Kelly AuCoin), after she steals his bait from him (guess what kind!) while he is fishing. Tom is a fledgling professor of Russian language and literature at Brown and his description of how he chose his field is one of the best moments of the production, its best actor doing nice work with Calhoun's strongest writing. Had the rest of the piece shown that kind of sophistication and clarity, Worm Day would have been a worthwhile show saddled with (hopefully) the year's worst title. Instead, the title feels alltoo appropriate.

Outside Providence, where Kate and Tom eventually marry and live, Worm Day introduces us to Marc (Will Swenson) and Erica (Brooke Fulton), who work at a public radio station in San Francisco that airs Marc's show about books entitled (yep) "Bookworms." We learn of Marc's principled refusal to change the show's title just as Kate Wormser refuses to change her last name when marrying Tom, and of Marc's repugnance for interviewing star authors because he is just too good a person for that. Erica, a radio producer and a rigid woman who makes lists of everything she has to do, has been charged with firing Marc but convinces him to interview a few John Updike types (horrors!) in order to stay on the air.

Eventually, Erica and Marc