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Girl talk
Bad Dates is a lightweight charmer
BY CAROLYN CLAY
Bad Dates
By Theresa Rebeck. Directed by John Benjamin Hickey. Set by Derek McLane. Costumes by Mattie Ullrich. Lighting by Frances Aronson. Sound by Bruce Ellman. With Julie White. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through February 1.


The interesting twist to Bad Dates is that the divorced heroine’s disastrous forays into romance, the play’s ostensible subject, prove the least of her problems. Bad dates, unless you throw yourself off a bridge in the midst or the wake of one, are not life-threatening. And by the time Haley Walker, clutching some cooked books and a cardboard box full of cash, nears the finish line of this one-woman play written for the engaging Julie White, the Romanian mob threatens and dramatist Theresa Rebeck’s television-crime-show credentials flash large.

The Brandeis-trained playwright and Law and Order: Criminal Intent writer/producer may be right that a bit of police-station intrigue can’t hurt a show that otherwise would consist of a scattered but likable transplanted Texan’s entertaining several hundred of us in her New York apartment bedroom with the build-ups to and post-mortems after a few "bad dates." Moreover, the writer lays at least a skeletal foundation for Haley’s precipitous leap from trying on shoes and licking romantic wounds to entering the witness-protection program with a Buddhist knight in legal armor. (Pay attention to the seemingly random early anecdote about attending a rain-soaked benefit for Tibetan Buddhist Books, where Haley meets an adherent of communing with all living things, including insects, whom she dubs "the bug guy.") Still, it’s hard to say whether the work wouldn’t be better off thinner but less farfetched in the stretch.

Like Nathan Lane’s turn in Butley before it, the Huntington’s Bad Dates offers a winning actor married to a role, if not much of a play. Not that Haley, ditsy but hardly dyspeptic, spirited rather than mean-spirited, is a match for Simon Gray’s acerb, alcoholic Ben Butley. A waitress who’s abandoned the Lone Star for the Big Apple, with the daughter of a rotten marriage and an Imelda Marcos–worthy shoe collection in tow, she’s been in New York a few years and, through some auspicious (for her) events involving her employer and the law, has become the manager of the eatery where she once waited tables. Moreover, having turned out to be something of a "weird restaurant idiot-savant," she’s turned the boîte into a hot spot. So Alice doesn’t live here anymore; she’s morphed into Mary-Catherine Deibel. Which still doesn’t account for the enormous size of her jumbled, shoe-strewn bedroom in a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, as designed by Derek McLane.

What Bad Dates has going for it is that its litany of failed assignations is idiosyncratic enough to sound drawn from life rather than from a female comic’s monologues, and that White inhabits the piece body and soul: the former lithe and always on the move, wriggling in and out of Mattie Ullrich’s clingy costumes; the latter interjected into what otherwise might seem too lightweight to hold our interest. Rebeck wrote the play for White, whose own experiences as a dating single mother, along with the plot of the 1945 Joan Crawford film Mildred Pierce, supplied the content. The play, which is a first-time directorial outing for the respected actor John Benjamin Hickey, debuted last summer at New York’s Playwrights Horizons.

White, a veteran of several Rebeck plays as well as of the TV series Grace Under Fire and Six Feet Under, is a pretty irresistible, Holly Hunter–esque presence with a broad, expressive face, an unruly frazzle of bouncing curls, and shapely legs whose feet she crams into more shoes than you’d find thrown around Filene’s Basement, the best of which are pronounced "timelessly cute." Utterly unselfconscious, her man-market-testing character expresses her incredulity at what she finds out there in a number of ways: open mouth, head shakes of amazement, arms flung wide, even a jumping-up-and-down little dance. Along with her slight Texas twang, White supplies Haley with some eccentric, emphatic inflections that add interest to the arguably cliché’d material. (Cheap shoes are bought at "ro-ha-hock-bottom" prices.)

The key to the hyperkinetic character may be found in her shouted advice to her off-stage 13-year-old daughter (represented by occasional bursts of muted rock and roll) to make coffee for a visitor without the "extra scoops" of java that mom favors. But White makes Haley not only speedy but also valiant and, in her disappointment at a good date gone terribly bad, even touching. It’s a showboating yet vulnerable performance in a theater piece that, if it isn’t Eugene O’Neill at the door with flowers and candy, isn’t a bad date.


Issue Date: January 16 - 22, 2004
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