Boys and Girls
in Boys and Girls
(Photo: Joan Marcus)
As a result, Donaghy's plays make audiences think "that's how people really talk"--the same reaction prompted by the work of Paddy Chayefsky and David Mamet. And it's true that Donaghy very often nails the ambivalence with which brittle but vulnerable cosmopolitans chat. He certainly does so in his new play, Boys and Girls, in which a character can answer a question (sort of) by murmuring, "No. Yes, I do. No." Or in which two characters can have the following, altogether convincing exchange:
JASON: What if we had dinner later?
REED: I don't--
JASON: Yeah.
REED: Yeah, I don't know. I've got to be cracking early tomorrow, get going.
JASON: You're right.
REED: Maybe if we weren't--
JASON: Right.
REED: --hadn't planned this--
JASON: Dinner is so huge!
REED: It is!
Yes, Donaghy has what is often called a great ear and he puts it to impressive use in Boys and Girls, as he has done in his other reputation-building works. But along with reflecting so accurately how oblique and amusing people can be when they blather, Donaghy has a concomitant problem--a couple of problems really. Ticket buyers are repeatedly jolted out of the moments of a play to contemplate not the truth of the action but the expertise with which the author's garrulous urban figures have been recorded; in time, authenticity becomes its own stylization. And, carried away with his gift, Donaghy too frequently forgets to acknowledge that there are times when the average Joe and Jane do talk in sentences that have beginnings, middles, and ends, and in paragraphs rife with logical thought. Such precious moments occur in Boys and Girls only when the characters are angry, when they've been pushed to the white walls supplied by set designer Douglas Steiner. No one, that is to say, has anything approaching a prolonged, quietly lucid utterance.
Perhaps because Donaghy counts on his skill at writing dialogue to see him through, he runs into an even bigger problem in Boys and Girls. The play follows a couple of years in the lives of two gay ex-lovers, Jason (Malcolm Gets) and Reed (Robert Sella), and two partnered lesbians, Shelly (Carrie Preston) and Bev (Nadia Dajani). The halting, staccato conversations in which these four indulge themselves revolve around whether Jason and Reed will resume their interrupted affair and possibly adopt a child; and, as to Shelly and Bev, whether or not they will keep their affair going and, if they do, how they can they find a father figure for Georgie, the son to whom Bev gave birth. Reed on his own is Bev's and Shelly's candidate; Reed reunited with Jason, who acknowledges his alcoholism, is unappealing to Shelly.
(Photo: Joan Marcus)
By the second half of Boys and Girls, Donaghy has set a pattern that undermines his four labile protagonists: for them, staying together or not staying together somehow seems about the same. Worse, as they shuttle from the bar to Reed's bedroom to Shelly and Bev's duplex to the beach and back, they become a quartet of cranks. Reed behaves like a spoiled child trying to rule the sandbox; Shelly is petty; Jason's sobriety is suspect; Bev is tiresome. When Bev finally queries Reed about the outcome of their game of musical abodes, it seems a stale question. The audience could care less.
None of the loss of interest, though, can be placed at director Gerald Gutierrez's feet. Throughout the play, Gutierrez catches the nuances of people touching or avoiding touch. The cast, meanwhile, can be congratulated simply for committing Donaghy's devilishly strung words to memory. Having accomplished that daunting task, they make the folk they're representing palpably real; admittedly, the range of emotions is limited, but they're all expert within those limits. There are a couple of love scenes into which they throw themselves wholeheartedly. Gets does run into trouble when has to deliver a long-winded, drunk-and-miserable tirade, but his work as part of the ensemble is aces.