Good cheer accompanies `Bad Dates'
Frothy, irresistibly charming, and bubbling over with weary good cheer, Theresa Rebeck's "Bad Dates" nevertheless manages to say a touching thing or two about the meaning of life. This is a feat as tricky to pull off as dancing in stilettos -- which, it's safe to bet, Rebeck can also do.
Or, at least, she creates a character who can. Haley Walker, divorced waitress from Austin turned restaurant manager in Manhattan, hops and twirls and prances in a series of increasingly improbable spike heels across her bedroom floor as she prepares for, then recovers from, one dreadful date after another. We don't get to see the dates, except as she recounts them for us. Thanks to Julie White's dazzlingly vivid performance, full of enough vocal and gestural expression to make you forget that she's the only actual person on stage, that's plenty.
Haley's the kind of woman who, in less skillful hands, could become a brainless fashion victim or a mean old man-basher. But White is so lively, so irrepressible, so doggone cute -- a word she manages to invest with a thousand Texas-tinged shades of delight -- that you just can't help falling in love with her Haley.
Haley herself is finding love hard to come by. Too many heels, perhaps: There's the guy who prattles endlessly about his cholesterol. The law professor who's rude to her but flirts with the waiter. The Buddhist who urges her to become one with all sentient beings, including insects -- which is why she nicknames him "the Bug Guy." And then there are the real losers.
On paper, Haley's singles-scene saga sounds as if it could turn mean and sour. On the Huntington stage, though, where "Bad Dates" came after White created the role last summer at Playwrights Horizon Theatre in New York, Haley's complaints and catastrophes are never less than amusing, and sometimes much more: deeply funny, poignant, and real.
Credit for that goes to Rebeck, whose work in film and TV (notably "Law & Order: Criminal Intent") may help account for her giddy sense of plot and expertly paced wit. Credit goes, too, to John Benjamin Hickey, who directs with a sure ear for both the humor and the pathos in Haley's story -- and who keeps her navigating deftly among all those shoes. (Nice work on those by costume designer Mattie Ullrich, who knows her Louboutins from her Choos.) Derek McLane's pleasingly cluttered bedroom set, adroitly lit by Frances Aronson, sets just the right tone, as does Bruce Ellman's sound design: the swell lounge music between scenes and the intermittent blasts of offstage rock that are all we hear of Haley's teenage daughter, Vera.
But the greatest glory belongs to White, who is simply a marvel. Best known from her guest role on HBO's "Six Feet Under," she brings to Haley a rich sense of life's complications and disappointments, an infectiously animated physical presence, and the effortlessly calibrated balance between drollery and depth of a born storyteller.
"Bad Dates" is full of good laughs, and that's great. But, thanks in no small part to White, it's full of something rarer: the laughter of someone who has known tears, and who has moved through them to a greater joy.
("Bad Dates"; Play in one act by Theresa Rebeck; At Boston University Theatre, through Feb. 1; 617-266-0800.)
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
