The Date from Hell
Source:  Time Magazine, April 10, 2000

Boy meets girl. Boy stalks girl. Rebecca Gilman puts us on edge.

A man and a woman meet for a beer, a blind date set up by friends. There are some first-meeting jitters: her jokes go past him; he pushes a little too hard. Still, they make a dinner date. There the conversation is more strained, and the woman ends the evening abruptly. She's too wrapped up in her job, she lies, to have a relationship. I'm sorry, but goodbye.

Then the nightmare begins.

Rebecca Gilman's new play, Boy Gets Girl, having its premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, eases us so skillfully into an utterly recognizable world--Theresa is a single magazine editor whose (largely arid) love life is the object of curiosity to friends and co-workers alike--that its unraveling grabs us with special power.  Tony, the good-looking but rather clueless date, won't stop calling. He shows up unannounced in her office. There are signs he's watching her apartment. Soon Theresa has a stalker on her hands. And we have one of the finest, most disturbing American plays in years.

Gilman, 35, an Alabama native who now lives in Chicago, has been quietly assembling an impressive body of work. Spinning into Butter, about the ramifications of a racist incident on a college campus, had a successful run at the Goodman last year. Her earlier play The Glory of Living, a shockingly deadpan portrait of a teenage girl who helps her husband abduct and kill young women, was produced at London's Royal Court Theatre early last year and won Gilman the Evening Standard award for most promising playwright. Yet because none of her work has been seen in New York City--that theatre hothouse where small talents get big write-ups--this gifted playwright has yet to attract major attention. That may change when Butter is produced at Lincoln Center this summer--or when Boy Gets
Girl, her best play yet, gets the wider audience it deserves.

The play avoids predictable paths. It is not a thriller--though the tension builds inexorably. Nor is it a diatribe about the victimization of women. Theresa, played with empathy and toughness by Mary Beth Fisher, is indeed a victim, but also a strong, fallible, fully realized character. As the terror mounts, she is forced to call the police, move out of her apartment and finally change her name and her life. But there's never a cry for pity, a whiff of the self-righteous. When her ditsy secretary confesses that it was she who gave Tony her home number, Theresa offers the expected pat of sympathy--"Thank you for telling me. I know that was hard to do." Then she fires her.

Gilman has a tragic vision of a society in which men and women cannot see each other as human beings. Yet her social comment grows organically out of credible, unexpected characters: the co-worker who offers Theresa comfort but also sees material for a story; the crass but oddly sympathetic porno filmmaker whom Theresa interviews for an article. Boy Gets Girl grasps at big ideas, but reaches the heart and the head with equal force.

--By Richard Zoglin