Preview
BOY GETS GIRL
Theatre Junction
Starring Elinor Holt, Ryan Luhning, Valerie Planche and Tim Koetting
Written by Rebecca Gilman
Directed by Kevin McKendrick
Runs November 19 to December 13
Dr. Betty Mitchell Theatre (Jubilee Auditorium)
Some plays dig so close to personal experience that they strike all kinds of nerves. I’ve known a few women who have been the victims of stalkers or stalker-like behaviour, so I found myself shivering with recognition as I read Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl.
I’m not alone. Gilman’s gut-twisting thriller, which Time Magazine named its top play of 2000, provides a thought-provoking examination of an aberrant behaviour that is becoming frighteningly familiar.
"Statistically, in the States, they say one in 12 women will be stalked and one in 45 men," says Elinor Holt, who stars in Theatre Junction’s upcoming production of Gilman’s drama. In Canada, where stalking has only been a criminal offence for the last 10 years, Statistics Canada says reported cases of stalking increased by 45 per cent between 1996 and 2000. The Junction cast could stand as a microcosm for such figures. In a show with just seven actors, one of them – Adrienne Smook – has endured a stalking experience.
Why is stalking so common? Gilman, as her play’s title suggests, lays a big chunk of the blame at the feet of popular culture and its message of how boys get girls.
The play begins like some run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, with a blind date between Theresa (Holt), a single, late-30s journalist for a New York magazine, and Tony (Ryan Luhning), a good-looking, affable guy in his early 30s. It’s clear from the outset that the two don’t really click, but Tony pushes for a second date and, when Theresa finally makes it clear she’s not interested in a relationship, he won’t take "no" for an answer.
Tony begins by sending her bouquets of flowers, phoning incessantly and even making a surprise visit to her office. However, after an angry Theresa finally blows up at him, his harassment starts turning ugly. Before the play is through, this spurned suitor has turned Theresa’s life into a waking nightmare.
Yes, Tony is a disturbed man, but, as Mercer (Duncan Ollerenshaw), Theresa’s fellow writer, points out to their editor Howard (Jim Leyden), the guy is also acting the way our culture tells us he should act.
"If you look at your classic, romantic plot line, it’s pretty warped," Mercer says. Boy falls in love with girl, boy pursues girl, girl finally relents, boy gets girl. "And that’s just what Tony was doing to Theresa. And he’s probably wondering, ‘Why don’t I get the girl?’"
"We get this message that, if a man just tries hard enough, the woman will say ‘yes,’" says director Kevin McKendrick, who is staging Theatre Junction’s show. His favourite example is the classic 1967 movie The Graduate – a film that helped define the baby-boomer generation – in which Dustin Hoffman’s young hero is so bent on getting his girl that he bursts in on her wedding and abducts her from the altar. The famous last shot, as they escape on a bus, has him smiling triumphantly while she gazes at him with quiet admiration.
Three decades later, despite the inroads made by feminism, that kind of mating-stag aggression is still celebrated, says McKendrick. In fact, The Graduate has recently been remade as a successful play.
"How men perceive women and vice versa, and how women and men perceive themselves, are issues that have not changed simply because we’ve got equal opportunities in the workplace," he says. "We wouldn’t have this much domestic violence if it had. As Mercer says, Why is it that a guy falls in love with a girl in a movie before he even gets to know her? We perpetuate that stereotype in every second song on the radio, in all those faux-reality TV shows about blind dates – that love is all about sexual attraction."
It’s a controversial thesis, of course – like blaming video games for violence or rap lyrics for misogyny – but Gilman has made her reputation for taking a provocative stance. The 38-year-old, Alabama-raised, Chicago-based playwright shot from fringe theatre obscurity in the late ’90s to international success, thanks to a series of plays like this, which wrestle with everything from innate racism to the motivations of serial killers, often exploring the way society shapes such behaviour. The critics in New York and London, where her plays are now regularly staged, frequently spend as much time arguing with her viewpoints as reviewing her writing.
Yet her work is also complex and credible. McKendrick, Holt and the other members of the Junction cast and crew have been doing extensive research to prepare for Boy Gets Girl – including consulting with the Calgary Police Service’s Domestic Conflict Unit – and they’re impressed by how accurate Gilman is.
According to the police, says McKendrick, Tony is a textbook predator – a rejected stalker. "All the classic traits are in the play. (Tony’s behaviour) is rooted in rejection. Any form of rejection makes them come back even harder. It’s an issue they’ve not yet been able to deal with in their own life."
"Once they’ve been rejected, they don’t want a relationship," adds Holt. "They just want to destroy the life of the person who rejected them."
Gilman chillingly depicts that destruction, as Theresa’s comfortable world deteriorates into one of anxiety and terror in the space of two months. The playwright has said she was inspired to write Boy Gets Girl after reading a piece in The New York Times that gave a list of ways to protect yourself if you’re being stalked. It brought home the fact that stalking can go so far as to completely uproot, if not ruin, a victim’s life. You may be forced to leave town, change your job and change your name, and still live in fear that your predator will somehow track you down.
But even though the story is told from the victim’s perspective, Gilman doesn’t go easy on her. As she did in her 1999 play, Spinning Into Butter – in which the leading character, a liberal white college dean, admits she’s a racist at heart – Gilman makes her protagonist a difficult and conflicted character.
"Ryan, who’s playing Tony, has been jokingly calling me Miss Mixed Messages," says Holt, who comes to the role fresh from a comic turn in Theatre Junction’s The Constant Wife. "It’s true. Theresa says she’s a feminist, but on the other hand she has this strong sense – which I think a lot of women have – that as a woman she’s supposed to be polite and blame herself for not wanting a relationship. In the end, it gets her in trouble."
Gilman clearly refuses to simplify or stereotype her characters. While Theresa is not especially likable, the play’s most overt symbol of pop culture’s objectification of women, a sleazy, soft-porn filmmaker – clearly modelled on Russ Meyer and played in Theatre Junction’s production by Tim Koetting – is given an understanding, and even empathetic, treatment. And, in one of the play’s unexpected twists, he and Theresa find a common bond.
Then there’s Tony, who at first seems like any awkward but well-meaning guy looking for love and wins the sympathy of Theresa’s naïve young assistant (Smook). Gilman is able to put a human face to even the most repugnant characters – as she first revealed in her 1996 breakthrough play, The Glory of Living, in which the central character is a Karla Homolka-like murderer.
That’s one of the aspects of her work that impresses McKendrick, whose past credits with Theatre Junction include directing last season’s Betty Mitchell Award-winning production of The Good Life.
"Gilman has this fascination with crime, yet she doesn’t disconnect the criminals from society," he says. "You can see that they are clearly connected to our own ills, as opposed to just being extreme wackos."
Brace yourself for another Gilman crime drama later this season, when Ground Zero Theatre stages Blue Surge, her 2002 play about the relationships between a pair of prostitutes and a couple of cops. |
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