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Rebecca Gilman is on quite a roll.

Saturday May 05, 2001.     By Joseph Bowen

Theater Feed

Goodman Theatre, 200 S. Columbus Dr., Chicago
Tickets: 312-443-3800
Through April 8

Rebecca Gilman is on quite a roll. Her past work is still fresh in the minds of many Chicago theatre-goers, due to the incredible success of her play Spinning into Butter (which opens at Lincoln Center this summer), last season's Goodman Studio production that delved all the way into racism and back out again. She now offers us Boy Gets Girl, us a terrifying play in which a blind date turns into a stalking.

Ms. Gilman writes about very difficult subjects, but structures her stories in a way that always leaves you guessing while at the same time examining your own attitudes. If all drama could be this effective, we may not have as many problems as a society. In Spinning into Butter, a black college student is harassed via threatening letters left on his dorm room door. When we later find out the student has been writing the notes himself, we are forced to examine our own prejudices in a very personal way. This technique in Spinning into Butter is especially effective, because we never actually meet the student in question. We are forced to develop our own opinions about a character we never meet - opinions, of course, that can only be informed by our own experience.

Ms. Gilman does something similar in Boy Gets Girl: she presents us with the face of the stalker, but we only see him in four scenes, and although he is slightly paranoid, we don't see the sociopath in Tony. After we lose sight of Tony, we only hear about the things that he has done after they are already done. As in Spinning into Butter, we are forced to examine our own past actions and our present attitudes. Have you ever parked outside someone's house, waiting for him or her to come home, or called someone up in the middle of the night, just to hear their voice, and then hung up after they answer? Theresa Bedell (Mary Beth Fisher), a reporter for a New York magazine, has a blind date with Tony (Ian Lithgow), a software trainer. They agree to meet for dinner on the weekend, and Theresa discovers that Tony is a little too eager to jump right into a relationship. He is also a little volatile and defensive, which gives Theresa a reason to tell him that she doesn't think it would work out between them. Through the barrage of phone calls and flower deliveries that follow, Theresa begins to realize that there indeed is something to worry about. Theresa's co-workers don't realize the seriousness of the situation at first, and her secretary Harriet (Shayna Ferm), even feels sorry for Tony. Eventually Howard (Matt DeCaro), Theresa's editor, and Mercer (David Adkins), one of Theresa's peers, become involved in helping Theresa avoid contact with Tony. As the evening progresses, the paranoia turns inward, and Theresa begins to doubt everything she sees. Things become much more violent before Theresa has to make a tough decision about her future.

The title Boy Gets Girl, although not the original, works extremely well for the play. Tony is portrayed as someone whose only exposure to culture comes not from books, but from movies - a fact that he is clearly insecure about. Tony was coddled by his mother, alienated by his father, and has very traditional views about the roles of men and women in society. As police detective Madeline Beck (Ora Jones) implies, Tony may subscribe to the old-fashioned boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, and boy-gets-girl-back school of thought. He may simply be waiting for the third part to happen. The point that Ms. Gilman makes in this play is that Tony is not someone that can just be quickly classified as a villain, a degenerate that we would easily recognize and avoid. He is a product of us all, and we have probably all done things that could be classified as stalking.

Boy Gets Girl is directed with excellent pacing and tension by Michael Maggio. The complex set design by Michael Philippi and sound design by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen add perfectly to the flow of the play. Mary Beth Fisher, in her second go-round as a Gilman heroine (Ms. Fisher played the main character in Spinning into Butter as well) plays Theresa as a woman trying to come to terms with what is happening while trying not to fall to pieces. All the supporting performances are equally as strong. Ian Lithgow, as Tony, walks that fine line of psychosis very well, although I am stumped as to why a Chicago actor could not be used for this role. Matt DeCaro, David Adkins and Shayna Ferm all give solid performances. Howard Witt has a wonderful turn as sexploitation filmmaker Les Kennkat, who oddly enough provides a strong moral to the evening.

Catch Boy Gets Girl before it closes. Rebecca Gilman is headed for the stars. I'm just glad her launching pad is in our back yard.