Fucking Girls
nytheatre.com review by Richard Lovejoy
February 26, 2011
Fucking Girls is billed as a "bromance for the stage." Whatever your opinion of Judd Apatow movies might be, a stage version of a "bromance" could be interesting. Theatre is a different medium from film, and there are unique opportunities to play with genre convention. Unfortunately, Fucking Girls falls into many of the traps of the "bromance" genre and the script lacks the polish, heart, specificity, and wit to make up for its numerous shortcomings.
The plot is standard—James has just been dumped by his girlfriend. He confides to his best friend Mike that his recent ex is the only woman he has ever slept with. At Mike's behest, he decides to try to sleep with all of his ex-girlfriends. Women are objectified and reduced to one dimensional caricatures while Mike and James drink and bond over homophobic jokes. And…that's pretty much it.
The cast is game and do their best to elevate the material. Carolyn Gilliam, who plays all the female characters, is particularly strong, despite having some of the most problematic material in the script. It is unfortunate that all of her characters are written without depth or agency, because Gilliam is clearly a talented and versatile actress.
Some of Gilliam's roles include a drunk, a feminist, and a hippie. The drunk has one drink and then the script has her passing out. The feminist is limited to a Rush Limbaugh stereotype of what a feminist be—including the mace and rape whistle. The hippie doesn't come off as someone who remotely resembles an actual hippie.
In addition, none of these "exes" seems to actually have a history with the protagonist. We're told that James dated them, but we aren't given any insight as to the story of any of these old relationships, nor does it inform any of the action.
Brendan McCarthy as the typical "insensitive alpha male" bro manages to mine some laughs from thin air, and Jon Bass as the "sensitive guy who just got dumped" bro admirably handles his character's seemingly arbitrary goals and desires. Unfortunately, the two men are not given much of a dynamic to play with. James, ostensibly the sensitive one, is sometimes just as offensively oblivious as Mike (if not more so.) Both characters lack specificity. There are also moments of contradiction, and ultimately the nuance of the relationship between the men becomes muddy and incoherent.
I'm not against the "bromance" genre. It bothers me when people say things like "I don't like sci-fi" or "I don't like Italian food." That's limiting. I know that a show titled Fucking Girls isn't going to be PC, and it might contain content that is offensive to certain audiences. That's fine—a playwright needs to have a point of view. Sadly, Fucking Girls sacrifices craft in favor of awful genre tropes. Ben Thompson is a young writer. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt—the press materials indicate that this his first attempt to bring a show to the professional stage. I hope that he writes another play, one where female characters at least have some agency and male characters specificity.
