‘A Kid Like Jake’ is a captivating, contemporary Cinderella story Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal Member, International Association of Theatre Critics Daniel Pearle’s one-act play “A Kid Like Jake,” currently on stage at none too fragile theater, provides a landing pad for helicopter parents – those cossetting caregivers who hover over their children in order to maximize their potential for greatness. Alex (Rachel Lee Kolis) has given up a legal career to be the perfect mom and is now fully committed to getting her bright and precocious 4-year-old son, Jake (who remains unseen), into a top-tier private kindergarten. And by fully committed, we’re talking obsessed. She sends out applications, which have been written with great care and then re-written again and again, months in advance. She works diligently with Judy (Laura Starnik), the placement adviser at Jake’s fancy preschool, to best prepare the boy for the battery of assessments that are part of the application process. She neglects her husband Greg (Geoff Knox), a clinical psychologist, who taps his infinite patience and vast knowledge of crazy behavior to keep his wife from imploding. Despite everyone’s best efforts to act in Jake’s best interest, no one quite knows how to handle the boy’s enthusiasm for “gender variant play,” such as dressing up as Cinderella and favoring dolls over toy trucks. Jake, it seems, is starting to identify as female. “A Kid Like Jake” is very much a domestic drama about what happens to a family when childcare is turned into a blood sport. But it also raises questions about the current state of primary education and whether human intelligence and gender identity are created by nature or molded through nurturing. For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/.