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Title:Boys and Girls.
Author(s):Charles Isherwood.
Source:Variety 387.3 (June 3, 2002): p31(2). (888 words) Document Type:Magazine/Journal
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2002 Reed Business Information

(DUKE ON 42ND STREET; 199 SEATS; $45)

NEW YORK A Playwrights Horizons presentation of a play in two acts by Tom Donaghy. Directed by Gerald Gutierrez. Sets, Douglas Stein; costumes, Catherine Zuber; lighting, David Weiner; sound, Aural Fixation; production stage manager, Marjorie Horne. Artistic director, Tim Sanford. Opened May 28, 2002. Reviewed May 26. Running time: 2 HOURS, 10 MIN.


Bev Nadia Dajani
Jason Malcolm Gets
Shelly Carrie Preston
Reed Robert Sella

A sensitive subject--the difficulties gays and lesbians face in negotiating the challenges of child-rearing--gets a swift kick in the groin from "Boys and Girls," a new play by Tom Donaghy that has its share of flaws, certainly, but probably doesn't deserve the savaging it gets at the hands of director Gerald Gutierrez in its world premiere production at Playwrights Horizons. The staging marks another sad misfire in the checkered career of Gutierrez, who did exquisite work on the celebrated Broadway revivals of "The Heiress" and "A Delicate Balance"--and has the Tonys to prove it--but has more recently displayed a coarser touch.

Production's aggressive comic tone is set in the opening moments, when ex-boyfriends Reed (Robert Sella) and Jason (Malcolm Gets) exchange brittle bursts of verbal gunfire during a tense get-together. The elliptical dialogue and caffeinated rhythms are reminiscent of the plays of Donaghy mentor David Mamet, but Jason's response to one of Reed's inadvertent references to his drinking problem--"I heard it without subtext," he shrugs--is all too telling.

Gutierrez and his actors--Sella being the most egregious offender --seem so desperate to accentuate the comic acid in Donaghy's dialogue that they ignore its potentially complicated emotional underpinnings; the staccato pacing turns the characters into purveyors of shtick and robs Donaghy's articulately inarticulate language of any significance it might accumulate if it were treated more spaciously. Instead of layered human beings we get standard-issue flippant gay characters lashing away at each other like windup toys on speed.

The play depicts Reed's relationship with his old friend Bev (Nadia Dajani) and her new girlfriend, Shelly (Carrie Preston), who are raising a boy and have decided to ask Reed to join their upscale menage to provide the male presence the youngster seems instinctively to desire. Reed is wary of this emotionally complicated situation, and isn't sure he's interested in being a surrogate daddy. (Donaghy is, however, somewhat slippery in defining his characters: At one moment Reed declines Bev's offer by asserting he's happy to be kid-free--and minutes later says he always wanted to have a kid with Jason. Huh?) Reed takes up a modicum of responsibility, but his relationship with this atypical "family" is compromised by his on-again/off-again relationship with the on-again/off-again drunk Jason, of whom Shelly strenuously and shrilly disapproves.

The playwright has taken aim at a potent situation and a timely subject, and intermittently the play reveals a clear-eyed insight into the ambivalence young gays and lesbians may feel in taking on the kind of responsibilities that prior generations have been unable--or unwilling--to pursue. Donaghy also should be credited for taking a hard look at the darker strands in the web of motivations that can drive gay people to establish families. Reed speaks of wanting to raise a child "better than we were" in order to have a place to put "our extra love" --rather solipsistic reasoning.

But Donaghy seems so intent on avoiding a rose-colored, politically correct approach to his subject that he tugs too far in the other direction: He so insistently accentuates the characters' self-indulgence and emotional immaturity that the play loses any sense of truth. Instead of a politically correct cartoon in which gay child-rearing is given a big gold star of approval, we get a smugly politically incorrect cartoon of contemporary gay culture.

The characters become caricatures wearing their pronounced psychological flaws like the latest designer duds; they're updated versions of the damaged gay goods found at the center of plays of the era of"The Boys in the Band." Donaghy has merely exchanged a benign formula for a more fashionably cynical one.

Sadly, Gutierrez's production gleefully accentuates the play's reckless disregard for its characters' humanity. Sella's perf is distinctly grating, particularly during a second-act scene at the beach in which he and Shelley resort to physical violence when the verbal kind proves too unsatisfying. It doesn't help that most of Reed's dialogue tends to be whining: Either the sunscreen isn't working or, "I was the first one of everyone to want a home and someone and then everyone got that and now I'm the last," he complains to Jason during one of their many scenes of rapprochement.

Preston's Shelly is perhaps even more distasteful: She's an emotionally stunted perfectionist who sees a child as the latest de rigueur accoutrement of her high-toned lifestyle. Gets and Dajani have easier tasks in presenting their less shrilly drawn characters, and do more creditable work.

The boy at the heart of this sour tug of war remains offstage--which may or may not be meant as a comment on his insignificance in the emotional lives of his "parents." In any case, it's a pity: However difficult this 4-year-old might have been, he couldn't be more unpleasant company than his quartet of adult caretakers. You can say this, at least, for "Boys and Girls" --it's the rare play to leave you pining for the presence of a child actor.

Title:Boysandgirls. (Reviews).(Duke Theater, New York, New York).
Author(s):David A. Rosenberg.
Source:Back Stage 43.24 (June 14, 2002): p45(1). (318 words)
Document Type:Magazine/Journal
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2002 VNU Business Media

Presented by Playwrights Horizons at the Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W 42 St., NYC, May 28-June 9.

Though long on that weary topic, relationships, and short on cohesion, Tom Donaghy's "boysandgirls" is an engrossing, if imperfect, evening. The Playwrights Horizons production at the Duke on 42nd Street demonstrates Donaghy's sure ear for the overlapping Mamet-like speech rhythms of people who seek yet fear connections.

The new work wants to delineate the growing maturity of two gay couples with parent and parenting problems (pouring their "extra love" into having children). One twosome, Reed and Jason, used to be lovers, but the former had stomach neither for the latter's drinking nor his irresponsibility.

The other two, Bev and Shelly, are raising the child Bev had via artificial insemination. The women want Reed to move in with them in order to provide a male image for their son. But Reed cannot free himself of his yearning for Jason. Shelly, frustrated at not being able to control others' lives, breaks down, forcing Bev to fly the coop. At the end, Bev and Reed tentatively reach for each other, perhaps to form an alternative family unit.

Donaghy's plotting proceeds in fits and starts, sending out so many strands that it ends in a stalemate. The play lurches, rather than drives forward. While his treatment of gay adoption as nothing extraordinary is admirable, Donaghy handles this firecracker topic in a way that seems peripheral to his story, not catalytic.

Gerald Gutierrez's direction captures the jazzy rhythms of neurotic people better able to communicate physically than verbally. Carrie Preston as the micromanaging Shelly, Nadia Dajani as the unsettled Bev, Robert Sella as the tantrum-prone Reed, and Malcolm Gets as the unstable Jason are all excellent, attacking their roles with absolute conviction, even as they struggle with some overripe diatribes.

Douglas Stein's set, David Weiner's lighting, and Catherine Zuber's costumes well serve the play's restlessness.