Girls Like That (Evan Placey)
In this critiques I don’t have a section called “As a Director” because I don’t like to think of myself as a director. I frequently have to be one, but that’s by necessity, it’s not something I really enjoy, and Evan Placey’s Girls Like That is the exact kind of director’s playground that I don’t want to be invited into.
A choral play, Girls Like That has nineteen characters and few attributed lines. The ensemble tells the story and it’s up to each production to decide how to distinguish the characters. The effect is as close to a first-person plural viewpoint as I’ve seen on the stage, which is a rarely seen, but also welcome way to tell a story.
Doing this emphasizes the role of the community, and while most of the individual statements are made from the “I” perspective, the effect of the whole thing is that the ensemble is acting as a unit- as disparate as its motives may be from time to time.
We’re introduced to the St. Helen’s girls, a group of twenty schoolmates who have been together their school career. Most of the play is spent in their senior year (or whatever the British equivalent is) though we do occasionally flashback to their younger years or some (seemingly) unconnected women from the past.
We’re introduced to the girls at five and they immediately arrange themselves into a pecking order (described very literally and gruesomely) with a girl named Scarlett at less than the bottom. During their senior year a nude photo of her is released and the play follows the efforts of the girls to understand and to often condemn Scarlett for her actions.
Over the show the girls realize, and often dismiss, their own callousness and the shallowness of their relationships, while coming to grips with how they view themselves and how they’re viewed by the world.
A beautiful repetition occurs throughout the play where the girls find themselves at a party, or in a circle, and they describe how they lay across one another, whose body is on whom’s. Early on this is a way to show how they’re connected and together, but by the end it becomes a symbol about how they hold each other down and keep themselves from doing what they know is right.
As a Producer
While the play is something similar tonally to things we would do, it’s focus on a younger ensemble as well as the dated nature of its common referential material make it less likely to be a candidate for us to produce it.
As a Designer
The play is a blank slate. With the exception of implying the costumes of the characters their is practically nothing said about what is happening or what we’re looking at. However, the number of bodies onstage probably limit the practical range of choices available.
As a Writer
I called out the choral structure of the show at the top because it’s an inspiring project and something that I would like to try someday. I don’t know how that fits into my current projects, but it has lit excitement in me the way little else has lately.
