Look Who's Stalking

Plays by Rebecca Gilman should come with a warning label: "As seen in Ladies Home Journal." Gilman constructs heavy, overwritten dramas, including Boy Gets Girl, now onstage in Echo Theatre's production at the Bath House Cultural Center, and Spinning into Butter, done last season at Theatre Three, around some mushy "women's issue." Two-dimensional characters yammer on and on and on about the central topic. Long expository speeches every half-hour provide supporting facts and figures that prove how relevant it all is. Forget plot, suspense or getting a believable main character from point A to B. In Gilman's work, the goal is to whip up a state of high-pitched hysteria over matters handled better on Oprah. A Gilman play feels like two and a half hours of watching a jackhammer on Jell-O.

The issue in Boy Gets Girlis stalking. A know-it-all Manhattan magazine writer named Theresa (overemoted by the flinty Ellen Locy) rejects her blind date, Tony (Tim Demsky). A twitchy schlemiel in khaki Dockers, Tony refuses to go away nicely. What at first looks like his ardent, if desperate, wooing of Theresa rapidly escalates into 24-hour surveillance and obscene threats. With little legal recourse, Theresa is forced to change her name, job and address to get away from the guy.

That's the play. It's also half the movies on Lifetime and Oxygen. Picture Brooke Shields as the pretty, pantsuit-wearing stalkee and Richard Thomas as the sweaty date from hell. Follow the movie with a dour public service announcement asking viewers to support some reactionary legislation making sending a woman too many e-mails a death-penalty offense. Then, a commercial for Match.com.

If only Gilman's plays were as wickedly entertaining as those Lifetime sob stories. For the life of her, Gilman can't type decent plots or make characters sound like living, breathing human beings. For Boy Gets Girl, her idea of authentic conversation is to have Theresa and the stick figures around her end a lot of sentences with "...or whatever."

Gilman's most egregious error is depicting Theresa as a thoroughly unlikable smart-ass. As the focus of the play, someone the audience should muster up some empathy for as she's stalked into seclusion, Theresa comes off as the uppity sorority sister everybody thinks is a snotty shrew. She's rude and thoughtless to everyone around her, but blithely expects friends and co-workers (well played by John S. Davies, Regan Adair and Leslie Patrick) to rally to her aid to help fend off the oily Tony.

Theresa's dialogue is written like $500 answers on Jeopardy, full of tossed-off references to Ernie Pyle, Edith Wharton and the early-20th-century author William Dean Howells. But wait a minute. Maybe playwright Gilman isn't as smart as she thinks she is. She has Theresa talk about all the "articles" she's written for the magazine. Hit the buzzer, Alex. Real journos call them "stories," "pieces" or "assignments." Small detail probably, but one that spoils any pretense of authenticity.

In Boy Gets Girl, the only halfway believable, warm and sympathetic character is, ironically, an aging Russ Meyer-like soft-porn producer named Les (beautifully played by Grant James, with and without toupee). When Theresa shows up to interview him for a profile she doesn't want to write, she brazenly insults a man who's spent a career worshiping women. Les sizes her up as a neurotic feminist and puts her in her place. "You are so depressing, you kill a joke before it hits the air," he says.

When Les benignly suggests continuing their chat at a nearby bar where the Yankees are on the tube, Theresa, an avowed Yankee fan, recoils like he's asked her to strip naked and dance on his lap. No wonder this woman's reduced to fix-up dates. She sees all men as dangerous predators. "Normal male heterosexual behavior is somewhat psychotic," she says.

If a male playwright had written about women with as much contempt and reduction to stereotypes as the award-winning Gilman writes about men in Boy Gets Girl, there would be protests and boycotts. But the current trend toward man-bashing in new works for the stage continues with little critical call to arms. Maybe it's like that line from "The Cellblock Tango" in Chicago: "They had it coming." Or whatever.

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Boy gets boy at the end of the slight but likable musical A New Brain, being done now by the Uptown Players at the Trinity River Arts Center. But first the main character, a budding composer named Gordon Schwinn (Donald Fowler), falls facedown into a bowl of ziti, signaling an attack of tangled vessels under his skull. The show follows Gordon through his ordeal, with whimsical numbers illuminating his near-death hallucinations and his unrealized dreams of becoming the next Stephen Sondheim. Dressed in a hospital gown and surrounded by singing and dancing scrub-clad doctors and nurses, Gordon sometimes appears to be the star of ER: The Opera.

A New Brain parallels the real-life medical saga of the show's composer and lyricist, William Finn (rhymes with Schwinn, see?). In 1992, three days after winning Tonys for March of the Falsettos (with writing partner James Lapine), Finn was diagnosed with a brain tumor and nearly died. He lived through surgery and recovered. In 1998 he turned the harrowing experience into a musical.