BAD DATES

At Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. Ticket Central, (212) 279-4200. Through July 6.

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AN attractive, funny waitress turned restaurant manager shares her hopes and disappointments with us in Theresa Rebeck’s new play, “Bad Dates.”

The play is kind of a one-woman comic monologue, though Rebeck attempts to make it something more.

But it’s a good riff, and it has an immensely winning actress: Julie White (“Six Feet Under”), a sexy, sassy and sympathetic actress who deserves to become a star.

White plays Haley, who, after an unsuccessful marriage, leaves Austin, Texas, with her 5-year-old daughter and comes to New York, where she chats with us in her bedroom before and after a series of disastrous dates.

Haley has a thing about shoes. She tries on approximately a zillion before each date, and experiments with lots of mix-and-match combos of dresses, blouses and skirts, running off to get the advice of her daughter, who is 13 by the end of the play.

She also talks on the phone, goes out with one guy who reminds her of the avaricious Zachary Scott character in “Mildred Pierce” (in which Joan Crawford rises, like Haley, from waitress to restaurateur), meets a Zen-spouting hippie, a guy who talks only about his stomach, and a Columbia law prof who turns out to be gay.

More important, she is very funny about each and every one of these encounters.

Nevertheless, Rebeck doesn’t want her play to be merely a comic monologue. So she invents some nonsense about the restaurant, from which Haley is rescued by the surprise reappearance of an unlikely character from her romantic past.

But she has in fact written a good monologue, cleverly directed by John Benjamin Hickey, delightfully designed by Derek McLane and wonderfully performed by White.