ABSTRACT
In the spring of 2003, I directed Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl for Echo Theatre, a professional theatre in Dallas. The script presented particular challenges, and we were an eclectic group with widely varying training and experience. I knew the leading actor, Ellen Locy, but knew none of the other performers prior to auditions, though I had seen the work of two; I had directed none of them before. We had a standard three-week, three-hour-aday rehearsal period prior to opening. The script, a seven-character, two-act play with nine scenes in each act, tells the story of Theresa Bedell, a magazine writer whose world is thrown into upheaval as she is increasingly terrorized by a blind date who turns out to be a stalker. There are multiple settings (including a magazine writer’s office, her apartment, a couple of restaurants, a pornography filmmaker’s office, a hospital room), with rapid scene changes that require actors (especially the central character, who is in all but one of the scenes and has a costume change for each one) to shift gears quickly from scene to scene. While plot is central to this piece (particularly in the sense of a classically melodramatic “What’s going to happen to Theresa?”), its successful enactment is dependent upon a sense of richly embodied characters and their relationships unfolding through the course of the evening.
