The Doghouse
If playwright Neil LaBute taught math, he'd express his formula for Some Girl(s) as:
(JerkGuy + AngryWoman1) +
Produced in the West End last year starring David Schwimmer, the play sports fluid staging by Jo Bonney and a starry cast-Eric McCormack ("Will and Grace") as a jerk named Guy and Brooke Smith (In Her Shoes), Judy Reyes ("Scrubs"), Fran Drescher ("The Nanny") and Maura Tierney ("ER")-that's obviously having a ball.
No doubt because LaBute's concept is as attention getting as an itchy finger on a loaded gun's trigger. Guy has spent nearly 20 years dating scores of women-breaking their hearts, destroying them-and equal time becoming a successful memoirist in New York City. Personally, though, Guy sees 40 looming ahead, and, more worrisome, he sees the vision of his 23-year-old fiancée in his rearview mirror. Before marrying her, he's taking a whirlwind tour of the cities where his exes still live.
The play's four scenes follow Guy as he revisits these former relationships in rough chronological order: He and Sam (Smith) were high school sweethearts; his hookup with Tyler (Reyes) was a grad school fling; his affair with Lindsay (Drescher) was an older woman/younger man dynamic gone sour; and Bobbi (Tierney), perhaps, was the only true love he's ever known.
Pretty honorable to offer the girls some closure, right? Not really. Guy's not much of a man: LaBute's crisp, naturalistic dialogue repeatedly reaches a moment when the women demand to know why he's reappeared out of nowhere, asking to meet in his hotel room. And repeatedly, Guy's explanations are flimsier than love notes that read "I love you" before being made into paper airplanes. Guy's plaintive wish to resolve the unresolved just doesn't fly, and when that thing is revealed...
I'll forgive the half of the audience that didn't see it coming. It doesn't matter since the point isn't whether Guy is still a dog, but whether a man can be both a dog and a reformed lothario.
Of the actresses, Smith's job is hardest-how to play a jilted girlfriend from 20 years ago? She acquits herself admirably. Bonney's intimate staging of Tyler's scene with Guy is one of the production's best.
Drescher is the eye-opener. As an academic whose fling with Guy nearly derails her marriage, Lindsay drives their scene from the top-and what she does to him is as coldly calculated as a neat mathematical proof. Drescher's nasality is gone, replaced with a sensuous whisper that connotes sexual heat that has all but gone. Some Girl(s) may be about a man who's a dog, but the star is the bitch.