By Kimberly Rau
Gamm kicks off 2025 with Dennis Kelly’s arresting “Girls & Boys” a one-woman show about a deceptively simple life that turns on a dime, and it’s something you shouldn’t miss during its limited engagement.
The plot is storytelling, and memory, and how we utilize both in order to live. In just under two hours, we find ourselves completely immersed in the colorful world of our unnamed performer, a girl next door of a woman with a British accent and a penchant for cursing. And it’s quite a world, quite a story.
Seemingly effortlessly, our performer takes us along memory lane, painting a picture of meeting her husband, starting her career, and raising her family. She is purposely generic – stylish but basic jeans, white top, simple haircut – and the set is just as blank a canvas. She could be anyone. She could be you.
Sometimes she’s speaking directly with the audience, other times, she is lost in her own memories, reliving scenes from when her children were young, when she was torn between the needs of a highly emotional daughter and an extremely active preschool-aged son. He wants to play war; she wants her mother to pretend to be a building inspector with a highly specific script. He destroys his sister’s art project; she wails with increasing intensity, and their mother is worn thin by the futility of trying to calm one and teach empathy to the other.
And if the stories seem somewhat implausible, the kind of thing that, if you heard it in real life, you’d stop your friend and say “yeah, but did he really say it like that? Did it really happen that wittily, that perfectly, that cohesively?” – well, that’s memory for you.
“Memories are pure fiction,” writes director Rachel Walshe in her program notes. “We are constantly re-writing our own memories. Rather than objective, unalterable snapshots of the past, memories are fictions of our own unwitting design.”
And the best part is, you don’t care, because here is this captivating woman. Here are her very relatable struggles with business, and marriage, and, especially, motherhood.
Anyone who has raised children knows what a blur those early years become as time marches on. If our good memories tend to grow warmer with time, the inverse is true for those that haunt us. Our narrator is complimentary of her husband, at least at first, and proud of her professional accomplishments, but judges herself harshly about her
years raising small children, questioning (as we all do as the years march on) if she has really done her best as a mother. But always, her stories are compelling, and we are drawn in.
Around halfway through the show, the narrative begins careening toward an inevitable cliff, some hinted-at but shadowy danger, but it’s too late. We are captive passengers, unable to change course and incapable of leaving our storyteller alone with her memories.
“It didn’t happen to you,” she offers, a weak reassurance before the impact, “and it’s not happening now.” We learn the only way our storyteller has survived is by using the very fact that memories can be altered to create a world she can stand to look back on. Who can blame her? You think you want your recollections to be a true account of the past, until history becomes unbearable.
Our performer (as she is listed in the program, not by a character name, but by her function in this narrative) is Donnla Hughes, and if you somehow haven’t noticed her work at the Gamm in recent years, it’s time to start paying attention. She is magnificent.
Walshe is a fantastic director who really understands script analysis (if you have the chance to take one of her classes on it, you should), and Hughes is a powerhouse of an actor who has you in the palm of her hand before 10 minutes are up. With a set design by Jessica Hill Kidd and costumes by David T. Howard, “Girls & Boys” at Gamm is a perfectly packaged and produced piece of theater.
“Boys and Girls” has been compared to “Faith Healer” and “Grounded,” two plays Gamm has also produced. I was lucky enough to review “Faith Healer” and can see the parallels; every person I talk to who saw “Grounded” at Gamm makes me jealous I missed it.
Similar to those works, the intimacy of this script is a powerful tool that will draw you in, even as it threatens to overwhelm you. My own memory, two days later, suggests I’m being dramatic, but no, that was me laughing at the impossibility of raising small children and having a career, and that was my heart breaking even as I was reassured that it hadn’t happened to me, and it wasn’t happening now. This is a rare sort of show, the kind of thing you should catch while you can, or risk wishing you had.
“Girls & Boys” runs through Jan. 19, 2025, at The Gamm Theatre, 1245 Jefferson Blvd., Warwick. Tickets may be obtained at the box office, online at gammtheatre.org or by calling 401.723.4266.
