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When actress Beth Broderick read "Bad Dates" for the first time, she was floored. She felt that playwright Theresa Rebeck had tapped into her brain when she wrote her one-woman play about the joys, dangers and absurdities of midlife dating.
"This play is about my life," Broderick said. "Haley (the show's lone character) is a hoot. She's very spontaneous, very wary. She's been burned, she's on her own, and she's a waitress. I was a waitress in New York for 10 years." Broderick chuckles throatily. "Although I was not as successful as her. I got fired from job after job. I must've worked at every restaurant in Manhattan."
"Bad Dates" takes place in Haley's bedroom. She is a recent divorcee and mother who's trying to reconnect with her romantic side. During the six-week slice of her life that's covered in the story, Haley rides the roller coaster of the Manhattan dating scene, an experience that includes a brush with the Romanian mob, acquiring 600 pairs of shoes and, of course, a succession of bad dates. Very bad.
Haley's tribulations brought back some scary memories for Broderick, a network TV regular (Aunt Zelda in the long-running TV series "Sabrina the Teenage Witch."). "I started to date and had some really funny experiences.
"This one fellow I met at the gym. I went out to dinner with him and he said, 'I've been watching you for a year and I never thought you'd go out with me!' Then he fainted at the dinner table." Broderick threw her hands in the air. "I didn't know what the hell to make of that.
"I met this other fellow, very successful, a contractor. For our first date we were supposed to go out for dinner. He called me and said, 'It's raining, I'm kind of beat, why don't you just come over and we'll order in and just hang here?' I thought, 'We're both adults - it'll be fine.' I go over to his apartment and he answers the door wearing nothing but a towel. And he started to give me a tour and I'm like, 'I can't take the tour, I'm sorry, you have to put some clothes on.' He was all mad at me because I'd ruined the atmosphere."
"Bad Dates" director Judith Ivey has a harder time than Broderick drawing parallels between Haley's experiences and her own life. "I've been married for 16 years, so don't ask me about dating. I don't remember a thing," said the Tony-winning actress, best known for her TV work in "Designing Women" and opposite Broderick in "The Five Mrs. Buchanans."
Ivey's list of directing credits, though not as impressive as her acting resume, has grown quickly in the past few years. It includes the off-Broadway production of "More" and "The Go For It Guy" at the Aspen Comedy Festival. Ivey knows a thing or two about one-person shows as well: She'll be touring in her own, "Women on Fire," later this season. It's a deceptively easy-looking format bedeviled with challenges, Ivey said. "Keeping it moving - that's the key. You have only one point of view on stage, and you have to create action without another person to bounce off of. To me that's always a big issue."
It's also crucial to give the actress moments where she can catch her breath, Ivey said. "You have to build it so that the performer ... gets (her) periods of silence, resting places. In this play, laughter is your resting place. If people don't laugh, then you're (finished)." The two women looked at each other, then chuckled. "With Beth, that'll be impossible," Ivey said.
By Paul Hodgins
The Orange County Register
September 15, 2005 |
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