A play about sexuality at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts promises to be explicit, but not outrageous.

Pascale Roger-McKeever is a playwright, director and ex-New Yorker living in the San Francisco Bay Area. On her website, she describes herself as a “battle-scarred, yet fiercely determined” mother and artist, “and a pretty fine chef who makes up recipes on the spot.” It’s hard to not be intrigued.

“I love Carmel, how can you not?” she says when asked about the connection that brought her play, The Ins and Outs of Fingers, Spoons and an Open Marriage, to the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts.

As the name suggests, the play is about a mid-40s suburban mom who agrees to an open marriage and finds herself loving it. She seems to be a “late bloomer” who suddenly discovers sexuality in such a powerful way that it infiltrates all aspects of her life.

Roger-McKeever wrote The Ins and Outs first as a 40-minute solo act for a festival in 2018. She kept adding bits and pieces, and during the pandemic developed the project into a full-length play. She has performed it 24 times.

Roger-McKeever feels a compulsion toward her artistic mediums. “Everything I do is because I can’t not do that,” she says, explaining her motivation behind writing this and not another play, and choosing the subject she decided to choose. “This is how I make sense of the experience of being alive,” she adds. She also believes that being true to oneself as an artist always resonates with the audience.

This version of The Ins and Outs comes from collaboration with director Austin Pendleton, who helped to “take the script to another level,” Roger-McKeever says. “Austin is 79 and he said he learned something about himself from the play.”

“Sexuality is boundless,” Roger-McKeever says about the premise of the play. Sex drive feeds so many things in life, “regardless of age,” she continues.

The play has many funny aspects, but it should be noted that it is explicit. “Explicit, but not outrageous,” is how Roger-McKeever puts it. “It’s definitely not something to sit back, kick off your shoes and eat bonbons. It engages you from the very beginning.”

So if explicit language “is the least of your problems, come to have this experience,” she says. “It stays with you. It lingers.”

THE INS AND OUTS OF FINGERS, SPOONS AND AN OPEN MARRIAGE 7pm Saturday, Dec. 17. Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, 4th and Guadalupe, Carmel. $50. 624-7491, bit.ly/OpenMarriagePlay.