Some Girl(s) is middle-of-the road Neil LaBute, not as scorching as Bash or This is How it Goes nor as flimsy as The Mercy Seat or Autobahn. This story about a man-soon-to-marry who travels around the country communing with past lovers never really finds its raison d'etre. A surprise late in the play, which is supposed to galvanize our understanding, instead feels gimmicky and insufficient.
The current production by Hat Trick Theatre is marginally good — only one performance out of five is truly outstanding — but because LaBute draws his characters so sharply, you can enjoy the conflicts and comminglings in the play almost in spite of some of the performances. In any case, LaBute's dialogue minute-by-minute is usually interesting, so even if the show doesn't finally add up to much, getting nowhere still feels like fun. This is an author with a mind of his own and zero tolerance for clichés. I'd rather see one of his middling plays than the best work of a lesser author.
The premise of the drama is that Guy, played by Paul McColgan, is days away from marriage, and making a kind of inventory of his love life before the nuptials change everything. Flying from Boston to Los Angeles and elsewhere, he meets past lovers in hotel rooms, and tries to make amends for past injuries he may have inflicted. The women he meets are all quite different from one another: there's Sam, the enraged romantic; Tyler, the sexually voracious goodtime girl; Lindsay, the resentful professor's wife; and Bobbi, the wounded identical twin. The ex-lovers may be different, but apparently Guy's modus operandi was the same with all of them: He told them he loved them, promised them a future, and then headed for the hills before anyone could tie him down.
Now, as he moves from town to town — each new hotel room signified by a change in wall art — he seems to want most of all to believe that he's right in giving up the bachelor life. But his ex-lovers aren't ever as cooperative as he needs them to be. Tyler, for instance, just wants to jump into bed with him, while Lindsay wants revenge for his abandonment of her when their affair was discovered. What's worse, it may be that the real love of Guy's life isn't the woman he's about to marry, but one of the paramours he threw aside. As he weaves through his past, he learns not only what scars he may have left on others, but also the damage he's done to himself.
Naturally, the actor playing Guy is the most important in the show, and the sort-of good news is that McColgan gives us a likable, if not very detailed, performance. McColgan has a boyish charm, and easily represents one of those fresh-faced, insensitive men who can't understand why the women in their lives are so often exasperated with them. But Guy's search is the play's only through-line, and because McColgan only offers a few basic emotions, we search him in vain for any subtleties or contradictions.
Among the ex-lovers there is one superb performance: Lynn Moore's as lusty Tyler. This is as complete and convincing a job as McColgan's is fractional and bland: As Tyler bounces from chair to bed, we feel ourselves in the presence of a woman in love with life and unashamed of her sexuality.
Carol Robinson as Lindsay offers a solid portrayal of a faculty wife who risked her family tranquility and lost, but the usually effective Magali Naas as Bobbi is unfocused, and Jonelle Meyer as Sam is shrill and over-the-top, confusing outward excess with deep feeling.
Joe Winskye keeps getting better as a director, though — he makes the most of the small Silver Meteor stage, and the uncredited hotel-room set could be a real room at the Holiday Inn. This is a big step up from past Hat Trick designs.
As for LaBute, he keeps churning out new plays at a record clip, and it's going to take some diligence to catch even half of them. Kudos to Hat Trick for bringing us Some Girl(s). If it's not the playwright's best, it's still original and fitfully eloquent.
This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2009.