Girls & Boys: Carey Mulligan Weaves a Tale

One of the greatest privileges of living in New York City is that world-famous actors come over and do off-Broadway productions that knock your socks off. If you're in the city or will be visiting before July 22, I implore you to spend some of your hard-earned dollars on catching Carey Mulligan's tour-de-force performance in Girls & Boys.

This is a one-woman play, so you will watch Mulligan on stage for two hours telling you the story of a British woman who starts off a bit aimless and unsure of what to do with her life, then slowly builds up into a story of a woman who creates a brilliant life for herself, and then tragedy strikes. When I asked my friend Katie if I should see the play she said, "It's so funny, but oh my god, it's SO TRAGIC." And I thought that was the most bipolar review I had ever heard until I watched this play myself and realized that really is the best way to describe it. 

The power of a brand-new play that isn't based on any existing book of work is that you get to experience the story unfold for yourself. You honestly will not know where this play is going when you begin. You will just know that you would happily watch Mulligan tell you this character's story for hours on end. She dazzles on stage, cracking jokes, flinging her arms out in abandon, smiling that incandescent smile that cannot help but fill you with hope and joy. Everything she does feels natural and real; even though the entire play consists of her breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the audience to tell them her story, you never once feel like this is fake. It's like you're her friend and she's telling you what happened to her. 

And what happened to her is not pretty. It starts out wonderfully, but what follows is a searing indictment of men and women and the roles they play in society and the tragedy that sometimes follows because we don't understand what's going on inside someone's head. I cannot promise you that you will leave the theater feeling remotely uplifted. But this is a powerful play for our current moment that conveys how we treat our Girls & Boys and where that leads when they turn into Women & Men. 

Written by Dennis Kelly, the dialogue is searingly funny and then searingly powerful, while Lyndsey Turner's direction is pitch perfect at capturing the various changes in scene and mood that accompany this riveting tale. Girls & Boys is only running for a few more weeks, and if you're on a budget, you can get $30 rush tickets like I did. So please, try to take the time to get some theater in your life and experience the transformative power of art and truly magical acting.