Bad Dates

This slight play has enjoyed a number of successful performances across the country because it is good fun, and, despite the rather elaborate stagings that I know of (Playwrights Horizons 2003, San Jose Repertory 2004, and Geva's large, handsome production), economically employs only one actor. Theresa Rebeck's consistently engaging plot is both thin and conventional until she decides upon a concluding shaggy-dog-story twist that gives the actress room for a variety of showcasing moments and sends the audience out shaking their heads with disbelieving amusement.

Director Mark Cuddy ignores the script's suggestion that a huge number of shoes make up part of the set. (A long line of them filled the New York version; a semi-circle surrounded the set in California.) Instead, he allows revelations of additional caches of shoes within the room's furnishings to provide growing hilarity and a belief that Haley Walker may not be exaggerating when she says she has some 600 pairs. That's a woman's mystique; and the play is scaled toward women, even aimed directly at some in the audience as Haley gives them entre-nous accounts of her unhappy attempts to begin dating again.

She's now divorced; her daughter is teenaged; and Haley is successfully set up running a restaurant and renting the comfortable apartment whose bed-sitting room we watch her in. The men in the audience can enjoy laughing at her trials and watching this attractive woman constantly change clothes and loll around on the bed while talking to us or on her telephone.

There are bizarre details, like the "Bug-guy" who tries to communicate with insects, and her mother's interfering setup of a blind date for Haley with a gay professor. But mostly, the material is the stuff of stand-up comics' complaints about the dating game, delivered with charm and wit but no shocks.

So I guess it's refreshing when Rebeck, a popular, prolific playwright, decides to enrich the brew with some very unlikely last-minute crises involving international criminal schemes, menacing landlords, laundered money, dope-dealing, and rule-bending helpful cops. What-the-hell.

Susannah Schulman gives a surprisingly natural tour-de-forcesentation of the resourceful, if ditsy, Haley. I like and even believe her.

Cuddy's funny, inventive direction seems busy but probably necessarily so in order to lend the monologue variety. Jack Magaw's good-looking scenery allows for some changes and surprises, all very attractively lit by Ann G. Wrightson. And Jennifer Caprio manages both believability and some showcasing oddities in Haley's costuming; I don't know whether I'd believe that the one pair of shoes which Haley says cost her $400 really would, though. But this play is about enjoyment, not belief; and this production is a crowd-pleaser.