Julia Louis-Dreyfus is Beth, a writer with a reasonably well-received memoir under her belt and a teaching gig at the New School. She has recently turned in another book, a novel this time, and she hasn’t heard back from her agent. Fretfully, she asks her psychiatrist husband Don (Tobias Menzies) if that means her agent doesn’t like the book. He reassures her that that couldn’t possibly be the case, and reaffirms how wonderful he thinks it is — but later, she overhears a conversation in which he confides that he just doesn’t think it’s as good as her memoir. What unravels from there is more than either of them (or the audience) could have imagined.

Time called writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Friends with Money, Lovely & Amazing, Enough Said) “the great poet of microannoyances.” She can paint with aggravation and vulnerability and clenched-teeth tension like Seurat did with tiny little dots: collect enough of them in novel shapes and interesting patterns and they become not just the content of the work, but its medium. And very few others have mastered that medium — the queasy, neurotic messiness of interpersonal relationships occupies a huge amount of our actual lives but relatively little of our movies. How honest should we be to those we care about if we know our answers will hurt them? Is lying to protect feelings a sign of real love or is it the opposite, allowing someone to develop a false idea of who they are and what they can do? Holofcener is determined to put the #drama back in comedy-dramas, and Tampa Theatre is here for it.