Boys and Girls OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Boys and Girls

  

  Night of Free-Flowing Verse, Booze and Elusive Connections on Dublin Bar Stools

  Andy Webster

  September 9, 2014: The 1st Irish Theater Festival begins this season with Dylan Coburn Gray’s Boys and Girls at the 59E59 Theaters, a florid account of a night in Dublin. Ribald, lyrical and brisk (at 50 minutes), Boys and Girls, a Dublin Fringe Festival hit, renders in pungent language the contemporary adolescent and postadolescent experience in urban Ireland. Four young people — described in the script as A (Male), B (Male), C (Female) and D (Female) — lined up on stools, take turns standing to tell their stories. Three recount an evening seeking romance, or at least physical companionship, while one (D) recalls staying inside with her boyfriend. Their evenings, only some of which involve sex, do not overlap. However, the four do echo one another in sequence with drinks downed in their perambulations. (“Is this my sixth?” “Six.” “Six.” “Six.”)

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• NEW YORK THEATRE REVIEW REVIEW OF Boys and Girls

  

  Not Just an Afterschool Special

  Victoria Teague

  September 7, 2014: DO NOT BRING YOUR KIDS. That’s the first thing advertised in the description for Boys and Girls, a play that emerged from the Irish spoken word scene and is part of Origin’s 1st Irish festival at 59E59 Theaters. And I would agree with them wholeheartedly that it’s definitely not suitable for children. But as a young adult who hasn’t quite grown up into the world of real “adults” I found it to be very funny and enriching. Yes, it’s dirty, and yes, it could be deemed provocative, but at its core Boys and Girls is blatantly honest, gritty, and real. Boys and Girls comes to the U.S. from a run at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2013, and gives Americans a taste of the Dublin nightlife scene. The play follows one night in the lives of four young Irish folk, each story told in extreme detail by the actor going through it. There’s the misogynistic playboy; the girl holding on to a relationship that hasn’t stimulated her for quite some time; a young man who’s been raised to treat women with respect; and a lost young woman just looking to get lucky for the night. Each shapes a real, living and breathing person, all of whom feel like friends by the end of the hour—because let’s face it, we intimately know each of those people. We go out with them on the weekends, we gossip about them with our friends. Boys and Girls lets you in on the intimacies of their night out.

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• STAGE BUDDY REVIEW OF Boys and Girls

  

  Review: Boys and Girls

  Lance Evans

  September 9, 2014: The promotional material on Dylan Coburn Gray's Boys and Girls, part of the 1st Irish Festival, describes it well: “Emerging from the Irish spoken word scene, this play paints the Dublin nightscape in pyrotechnic verse; 4 intercut voices muse, tease, and rant in an ever-escalating rhythm.” This is not a play. It is spoken word, in verse. Much of the time, it is spoken tongue twisters. Much of the time, our American ear is working overtime to follow the sounds coming off the mouths of the four extremely talented young performers spinning their tales of late night adventures, sexual escapades, and dealing with all the mixed signals and emotions that come with the climb out of adolescence. The four performers, two boys (Seán Doyle and Ronan Carey) and two girls (Maeve O’Mahony and Claire O’Reilly), take turns standing, having the spotlight on them, and describing with full energy and amazement the events of the past evening: sharing the things that went well, that made them happy; sharing the things that did not, and their attempts to deal with it as best they could.

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• THEATER PIZZAZZ REVIEW OF Boys and Girls

  

  Class Dismissed: Boys and Girls

  JK Clarke

  September 9, 2014: The program for Dylan Coburn Gray’s Boys and Girls (playing through September 28 at 59E59 as part of the 1st Irish 2014 theater festival) comes with a glossary of terms, mainly to help American audiences understand Dublin-specific Irish expressions. It’s useful to read the sheet before the play, because we’d likely have no idea that “Alchemy” is a horrible, sleazy, infamous nightclub, or that “getting the shift” refers to making out. Unfortunately, there is no guide to help erase the cultural rift that makes Boys and Girls both irrelevant and uninteresting to an American audience that is neither of the generation or culture that would find itself in a hip hop or techno nightclub. And there’s nothing particularly compelling about the characters that might draw one in to that subculture, either. Boys and Girls is four one-person shows crammed into a one-hour production. Ronan Carey, Seán Doyle, Maeve O’Mahony and Claire O’Reilly play four nameless, early-20 somethings who go out nightclubbing—replete with excessive drinking, drug taking (ecstasy, a common, euphoria-inducing club drug), dancing and, finally, hooking up. They tell their story in individual rhyming monologues. Unfortunately, the rhyme scheme sounds like poorly constructed, uninspired, vulgar (yet somehow sterile) rap lyrics with a cadence reminiscent of Dr. Seuss; and it doesn’t match the spirit of their stories: ”Find my humour, distasteful, crass, dated? I find it wasteful when your mouth moves and my penis remains unfellated.” Cringe.

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