Jessica Rothert is a charming and exceedingly talented actress, and Bad Dates is a charming and exceedingly insignificant play. As it escorts us through the dating jungle, Theresa Rebeck's one-woman show has nothing new or important to say about love, sex, men, women, shoes, blouses or any of the other subjects that come up over its 90 minutes. Still, there's Rothert's performance to enchant us and keep us from glancing too often at our watches. Here she is trying on clothes, brushing her teeth, crying, laughing and eating a pretzel as she regales us with stories of men who repeatedly turn out not to be keepers. And, wonderful to recount, she never once strikes a wrong note. In fact, Rothert's character, the Texan-turned-New Yorker Haley Walker, is so completely believable, you'll want her for a buddy with whom to drink late into the night while recounting your relationship woes. As for dramatic urgency … Who said the theater had to be special, anyway?
When we first meet Walker, she's wearing a red bathrobe and reflecting on her shoe fetish. Like Sarah Jessica Parker's character in Sex and the City, Walker is a footwear collector with a preference for expensive designer items, acquired, in this case, at bargain prices. But it's not long before ingratiating Haley gets to her real subject: the search for a male partner. She tells us that she used to live in Austin, married a man named Roger, had a daughter with him, and then discovered that he had traded their Toyota for pounds of marijuana. One divorce later, she moved to New York, and found a job as a waitress in a Romanian restaurant that was really a front for a money-laundering gang. When the criminals at her bistro were finally arrested, she became the "restaurant idiot savant" on whom the remaining employees depended, and, not incidentally, a magnet for men. Now the real story begins. Her first suitor is Louis, but he too much resembles the villain in the Joan Crawford movie Mildred Pierce, so she has to turn him down. Then she gets invited to a benefit for Tibetan Buddhist books, where she meets the fellow she calls "Bug Man," since he's fascinated by the concept of speaking to insects. Not being a bug, she moves on: to a guy who rudely asks her age, talks a lot about his cholesterol, and gets particularly excited describing his colonoscopy. By the end of that evening, both male and female are annoyed with each other; but the guy tries to take her to bed anyway (she escapes with some unavoidable French kissing). So she accepts a blind date, arranged by her mother: and this snobbish Columbia law professor, who won't deign to explain the sort of law that he teaches, turns out to be gay (though he himself seems not to know it). Becoming increasingly desperate, she calls back old Louis — the Joan Crawford casualty — and invites him to her restaurant. Finally, the stars cease colliding. He's handsome, attentive, polite, clearly attracted — she arranges for him to come to her apartment for a night of sex. But then, how'd you guess, another disaster strikes; and to make matters worse, the head mob guy from the Romanian restaurant is out of prison and gunning for his favorite waitress. Will Walker ever find a good mate? Will she last long enough for it to make a difference?
Amid all this over-familiar material, one out-and-out winner is T.C. Ecenia's set design. Ecenia places Haley Walker in a wonderfully realistic bedroom strewn with shoes and shoeboxes, and looking as lived-in as the place you come home to at night. Walker's costumes are also a big part of the play — she spends much of the evening trying on and taking off clothing — and there are three designers responsible: Rothert herself, Rosemary Orlando, and Gerrie Louise Gates. Speaking of Orlando, this talented artist has repeatedly demonstrated that she's one of our best actresses; here she can make a claim to be a first-rate director too. I've attended lots of one-person shows, but seldom have I seen one as physically busy — in a persuasive way — as this one. Another versatile talent, Karla Hartley, is responsible for the perfect lighting and sound design.
But wouldn't it be nice if all this talent had been expended on a script of real merit?
Bad Dates, I'm sorry to say, has no real reason for existing. But there it is anyway. And there's someone producing it.
How that happened is the real mystery of this likable, forgettable play.
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2009.