Let’s start with the recommendation: Girls & Boys now showing at the Gamm Theatre is a powerful one-person show with a stellar performance by Donnla Hughes. Blending (fictional) Moth-like storytelling with a heartrending twist, it is a riveting emotional rollercoaster ride. It’s a limited run, so if you want to see it, buy tickets today.
Now the criticism…
Girls & Boys is a play that manipulates the audience and makes them passively complicit co-conspirators after the fact.
Inside the media kit, in a white sheet of paper, in huge type was the following:
Attention Reviewers:
Girls & Boys includes a major plot reveal. Kindly refrain from including any spoilers in your review.
Don’t worry. I won’t, but that severely limits critical conversation about the play itself. It also changes the way I saw the piece.
Instead, if you’re a regular theater-goer, you may read the notes from the director, Rachel Walshe, which list simplistic statements like
“1. There are Girls and there are Boys….
- We are failing boys on a massive, MASSIVE scale….
- Violence is healthy….”
This is complete and utter misdirection. None of those topics were important.
What follows appears to be the story of an unnamed young British woman on the upswing after coming off a post-university spiral into depression. Think Bridget Jones, but brighter. She falls in love, locks onto a career, and has children. She is likeable, witty, and fallible, especially with her children.
The fact that the narrator is British gives the play instant authority in the American theatre-going mind. We’ve been trained that the English really are better at digressive and intellectual theatrespeak. She can make fun of supermodels, be biased against other European countries and use words like “slag.” Her precious daughter wants to build a model of London’s Shard building out of Mud. It’s also somewhat reassuring that the events aren’t nearby.
Bit by bit the narrator’s life gets better. And then the play starts cross-cutting. Scenes alternate between conversational storytelling directed at the audience and acted/mimed battles between a mother and her young daughter and son. In a way, the family scenes, where Mommy is close to losing it, are a relief, because this woman’s trajectory of success in the film business is right in line with those supermodels that her lover/husband dismissed so decisively early on.
Set on a large platform pedestal with just a red chair, the acting is riveting. Hughes is onstage by herself for almost two hours, and you can’t stop rooting for her even as the script focuses your attention down the tracks at the distant light of the oncoming train.
And wrong it does go. The narrative begins to unravel. And here’s the part that I can’t really talk about without spoilers.
We assume that she’s telling the truth, but perhaps the narrator is lying? Who is she talking to? At first it seemed like a comedy monologue, but then it turned into a group therapy or educational seminar.
The narrator lays down a bunch of trigger warnings, “This didn’t happen to you. It is not happening now.” But there really isn’t time for anybody in the audience to get up and leave.
And then the train wrecks and we observe the rubble and dismembered debris in exquisite and horrifying detail.
A single actor with just a few words and gestures creates an experience that keeps the audience in breathless silence for the harrowing final half-hour.
If we were in postwar Germany, or even in the 1970s or 1980s, this is where the play would have ended, amid the rubble. Things go wrong, we’re not sure why, and stuff happens.
But today’s theatre requires morals and lessons.
So, instead of leaving us in shocked misery, the last line is a platitude, and the final scene – which seemed to me to be tacked on – diffuses into a fond cozy memory, and a musical tune that intimates it was only a dream.
If you see Girls & Boys, and I hope you do, the car ride home with your friends or family will be quiet at first, and then very very interesting.
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Girls & Boys is at the Gamm Theatre through January 19. 401-723-4266 or gammtheatre.org/girls
BIO: Mark Binder is an author and storyteller. His latest book is The Council of Wise Women by Izzy Abrahmson (his pen name).