LI teen has B'way ambitions in 'Secrets of the Trade'

Stealthily, in the middle of the August droops, comes "Secrets of the Trade," a robustly conventional, engrossing and substantial addition to the theater scene.

Ground is certainly not broken in Jonathan Tolins' coming-of-age serio-comedy, which he wrote in the mid '90s but which didn't have an attention-getting production until Matt Shakman directed it in Los Angeles a couple of years ago.

But the play - disarmingly staged by Shakman with a quick-witted cast of nuance specialists - sidesteps the apparent cliches of its funny / sad smart-mouth genre. At first, we think we've been thrown back into Neil Simon / Woody Allen territory. Andy Lipman, who ages from 16 to 26 in little more than two hours, is embodied by Noah Robbins, the gifted teen whose smashing Broadway debut last season was derailed in the short-lived "Brighton Beach Memoirs."

Andy is a bright Jewish kid from Port Washington, an only child whose parents (Mark Nelson and Amy Aquino, both wonderful) support his precocious Broadway ambitions.

Andy maneuvers himself into an informal mentorship with a big-time director, played with blissfully erratic sincerity and seductive vanity by John Glover. All the characters are more interesting and unpredictable than they first appear, including Bill Brochtrup as the gay director's loyal assistant and guard dog.

So, yes, Andy has a coming-out scene and his mother has an abandonment crisis and the mentor proves to be self-serving and predatory - but seldom in the ways we expect. Tolins, who had an early Broadway flop with "The Twilight of the Golds" and an Off-Broadway hit with "The Last Sunday in June," writes tight, bright dialogue and characters who, despite the familiarity of their types, are nobody's fools.

We are transported, with minimum fuss and scenery, from Long Island to Broadway, from Cambridge to L.A. The style is realistic and old-fashioned, until curveballs intervene by way of telling little arias and wild little scenes of hallucinatory surprise.

WHAT "Secrets of the Trade"

WHERE Primary Stages, 59 E. 59th St.

INFO $60; 212-279-4200; ticketcentral.com

BOTTOM LINE Conventional but surprising coming-of-age comedy.