SOME GIRL(S)

Written & Directed by:  Neil Labute
With:  Mark Feuerstein, Rosalind Chao, Paula Cale Lisbe, Justina Machado & Jaime Ray Newman
Running Time:  1 hour 45 minutes, no intermission
Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at
The Geffen Playhouse
Los Angeles
http://www.geffenplayhouse.com
February 6 through March 9, 2008

Cute guy, good with the words, boyish charm, madly in love ... with the entrails of his mind.  Yes, I am sure we have met, maybe spent a few months together.  Hard to forget in an acrid sort of way; he ends up lingering in unsuspecting corners of the mind.  In Neil Labute’s Some Girl(s), we meet him again.  Guy, Mark Feuerstein, a thirty something, is just about ready to settle down to marriage with a young nursing student.  But first he wants to check in with four of his ex-girlfriends in a disguised effort to insure his indelibility in their minds and, who knows, maybe a little fun before the final commitment..  It is kind of a tour through his romantic rubble.

Some Girl(s)), ostensibly a one act play with four scenes, is four separate playlets with, you guessed it, our hero traveling around the country for one last meeting with four of his exes. There is no real arc here as the bones of the story are pretty much the same in each case:  a review of his intense involvement until the time he is either bored or afraid of commitment, and a quick unsatisfying end from the girlfriend’s point of view which gets re-enacted in each of the four short meetings in four different cities.  Sibyl Wickersheimer’s versatile set is transformed into four similar, but not identical, hotel rooms like something Anne Tyler might have imagined for the Accidental Tourist, the set crew dressed like hotel maids as they change the spreads, puff the pillows and adjust the furniture.

Guy has just had a story published in the New Yorker.  Outwardly self effacing, he disingenuously leaves a copy of the magazine obviously tossed about.  Three of the women just happened to have read it and found striking similarities to their memories of their own relationship with him.  I will leave it to you to guess how that went down with them.  His line is that he has set up these meetings before his marriage just to “make sure we are OK, no harm, no foul.”

The first encounter is with his high school sweetheart Sam, Paula Cale Lisbe.  She is still in their home town, married to another high school alumnus who manages a supermarket.  Guy is obviously still on her mind, and she obviously confirms his belief that she was not the girl for him (he had bigger things in mind for himself); yet he does not want to be forgotten.

On to Chicago where he had been a graduate student and lusty Tyler, Justina Machado, an artist with an appetite for self-indulgence that seems to match Guy’s and a readiness to go back for a little second helping.  Machado brings an earthy sexiness to her role no plastic surgeon could create.  She is as real and appealing as she was on Six Feet Under.  Tyler loves the game of sex and Machado loves playing the part.  Yet, even with this seemingly ready for anything woman, Guy manages to land some blows as she discovers that throughout their months together his mind was on someone else.
When she confronts him with the article he tells her “as a writer you have to tell it.”  To which she answers “and sell it.”  He is an over intellectualized Lothario and, hurt in spite of herself, she is on to him.

Lindsay, Rosalind Chao, was his squeeze when he first began to teach in Boston.  A professor of women’s studies, this attractive older woman just happens to also be the wife of his boss and mentor, now dean of the department.  Lindsay is a woman to be reckoned with.  In ways I will leave for the theatergoer to discover, she is the only one of the four to emerge without a re-opened scar.  When she referred to his New Yorker article she said, “hurt is your number one by product ... that is what you do and teach: fiction, because that is what you do as a person.”  She definitely has his number and will not let him get the best of her again.  She gives as good as she got.

Lastly there is Bobbi, Jaime Ray Newman, a leggy blond doctor from Los Angeles who, just maybe – here La Butte is perhaps a bit too subtle -- is still a regret in his mind.  Not that he shows it initially.  There is a bit of a surprise, no reason to reveal it, but by now you have a pretty good idea of where the scene will go.

Well written, with many a well turned phrase, Some Girl(s), is entertaining but not momentous.  Not quite a comedy, but with some funny lines, and not an in depth exploration of character (we pretty much have Guy figured out before the end of scene one) it plays as very good made-for-TV HBO special.

In the end what Some Girl(s) gives us is a road trip through a self indulgent man’s relationships.  Hopefully his fiancé is not your sister, your daughter or yourself.

Karen Weinstein

http://www.karenaw@aol.com/