Rebecca Gilman's Boy Gets Girl At The Celebration Theater In Lansdowne Gives Chills And Food For Thought

Theater: Celebration Theater
Show Title: Boy Gets Girl
Opened: October 12, 2007
Seen: October 14, 2007
Reviewer: Karin Suni
Submitted: October 17, 2007

 

Few things in this world are creepier than a seemingly normal person who turns out to be the exact opposite. Lansdowne’s Celebration Theater’s production of Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl tells a story that has your skin crawling and you wondering just how possible it is that this could happen to you. What starts off as a perfectly normal blind date between Theresa (Jennifer Summerfield) and Tony (Jim Hopper) that doesn’t turn out to be love at first sight rapidly descends into a dark and dangerous situation when Tony refuses to accept Theresa’s dismissal and instead becomes her stalker.

 

Ms Summerfield had a lot of responsibility for the success or failure of this show resting on her shoulders. If she had been unable to present the audience with an ever-rising sense of fear and dread, then all her actions would have seemed paranoid, and it would have been that much harder to care about her situation. Fortunately, she was up to the task and gave us a performance that walked a tight-rope line between flat and uninteresting and over the top and unbelievable. Every time I was concerned that she was going to slip into a two-dimensional caricature of a frightened woman, she pulled back just enough to stay real.

 

Her performance was greatly enhanced by those of Ed Gretz, as Theresa’s boss Howard, JP Timlin, as her co-worker Mercer, and Ben Kendall, as the moviemaker Les Kennkat. These three provided opportunities for Ms Summerfield to show emotions besides fear and allowed her to have some softer, quieter moments. This alone would be enough, yet all three also created whole and complex characters that feel as if they have back-story. Because of this, their scenes, especially those without Theresa in the case of Mr. Gretz and Mr. Timlin, take on a richness that keeps their characters from only being supporting roles.

 

Mr. Hopper also had quite a task in front of him as Tony only appears in the first few scenes. After that, he is just an unseen spectre, a disembodied voice, a disturbing missive. This means that he must lay all of the groundwork for his future actions right at the beginning without being blatantly frightening. Because I was aware to some extent of where the plot was headed, I was on the lookout for clues of what Tony was capable of. Mr. Hopper had the socially awkward, nervous and eager parts of his personality down, and I was able to find a hint of creepiness underneath. However, if I had not known to look for it, I’m not sure that there was enough of a sense of underlying malice and propensity for violence to have made Tony’s later actions seem in character.

 

Laura Cevallos and Dana Corvino round out the cast as Madeleine, the police officer assigned to Theresa’s case, and Harriet, Theresa’s secretary, respectively. Both do well at moving the plot forward and increasing the stakes of what Tony might do and the choices that Theresa might have to make.

 

The set design took advantage of the space available in an interesting way, though the middle of the three separate settings that were placed on the floor in front of the raised stage lacked the sense of defined space that the other two, as Theresa’s office and Kennkat’s home, had. One issue to keep in mind about the space is that by the end of the play, the folding chairs had ceased to be comfortable, and I noticed that other audience members were shifting around a bit trying to find a different position. At first, when I saw how close the seats were to the performance area, I was concerned that it would be a constant reminder that these people are actors thereby detracting from the play itself, but in fact, having so much of the action take place in such close proximity to the audience made it that much harder to distance oneself and think “this could never happen to me,” which made the play all the more frightening, which is exactly what it should be. 

 

Boy Gets Girl runs through October 21^st with performances held at the Twentieth Century Club in Lansdowne.