Boys!
Keyhole Players
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Boys! revolves around three friends. Maureen Johnson and Kristin Morris are lawyers–which in real life wouldn’t necessarily mean that they’re competitive, bitter, and vindictive, but here it does. The third member of the trio, 25-year-old Jocelyn Weber, wears tight tiger-print skirts to attract wealthy older men, who take her on cruises and buy her gifts. All three women are dependent on men. Maureen is sleeping with Ray (Brandon Su)–they have sex every morning even though he’s a married man who keeps promising to get a divorce and she has a boyfriend, Pat (Dwight Sora), who spends his days watching TV and taking hits off a long purple bong. Kristin’s boyfriend, Kyle (Choky Lin), is like a house pet: she supports him financially and takes care of him emotionally. She thinks she’ll convince him to marry her even though he’s said emphatically that he never will.
The loosely woven plot follows these relationships but focuses on Jocelyn’s entanglement with a former beau, Richard (Shreeyash Palshikar), newly divorced and now stalking her (he sends her a light sculpture that includes a creepy enlarged picture of her eye). In the first act, Jocelyn sues Richard for the right to be left alone. When a riotous court scene resolves that issue just before intermission, there doesn’t seem much reason for a second act. And indeed it’s less driven by plot: all three women simply go back and forth about the men in their lives. By the end very little is settled, but that seems right–these women are permanently indecisive.
The show’s one redeeming feature is Demetria Thomas’s monologue about her devolution from proud, happy child to fearful, anorexic young woman. She’s the only ensemble member to show any kind of transformation, and it happens slowly and sadly and inevitably. Thomas’s story is not about a woman because she’s a woman, and therefore special and therefore good. Her story doesn’t celebrate or condemn her character–it simply tells the tale of a human life lived painfully. Bad things do happen to women, and not just to those who behave badly.
