The program will tell you that the play is set in, "Haley's bedroom in an apartment in New York City," but that doesn't do justice to what's onstage at the Stiemke Theater. Scenic Designer Linda Buchanan's set looks like a New Yorker's decadent earth-tone dream, sumptuously bathed in soft lighting that almost seems lovingly handcrafted photon-by-photon under the inspired gaze of Lighting Designer Noele Stollmack. What's more, it's covered in boxes and boxes full of what appear to be expensive, designer shoes. If this is somebody's bedroom in a New York City apartment, it also bears a striking resemblance to a fashionable, young woman's Id. The set brilliantly supports "Bad Dates," a charming one-woman play by television screenwriter Teresa Rebeck.
Elizabeth Heflin plays Haley Walker, a single mom of a teenage girl who runs a trendy restaurant. With enough time having passed from the disaster of her last relationship, Haley decides to re-enter the dating world. She relates horror stories of reasonably bad dates to the audience in a very casual and intimate tone. We watch her dress and try on shoes as she speaks quite candidly about all the rather interesting details of her life.
The feeling of intimacy is really important to a show like this. Without a palpable sense of intimacy in Haley's bedroom, the prospect of spending the entire 90 minutes without intermission listening to a single woman onstage talk seems a bit daunting. In spite of being the smallest established stage available to the Rep, the Stiemke is still relatively huge and cavernous in comparison to most of the theatrical stages in Milwaukee. The decision to cut down on stage space by adding chairs was a brilliant solution to this. Normally a proscenium, the Stiemke has been turned into a thrust stage for "Bad Dates." What's more, there is a large aisle down the center of the stage which allows Heflin to directly interact with the audience.
For her part, Heflin needs to work the space exceptionally well to hold the audience's attention for the entire length of the show and she is certainly up to the task. She moves through the plot arc of the story in a captivating way, deftly balancing a performance that's both interesting and exotic while simultaneously being casual and intimate.
Heflin even manages to hold the audience's attention as she briefly leaves the open view of the stage on a number of different occasions. Most often, she's leaving our view to speak to her daughter. Though we never see Halley's daughter, she's "played" in a sense by Sound Designer Linda Buchanan. Every time her door opens down the hall out of view of the audience, we hear brief snippets of high-energy contemporary teen girl pop music. It's a clever way of characterizing a teenaged girl.
Having successfully negotiated the perplexing pressures of writing for television for a number of years, (she's a producer on "Law And Order") Teresa Rebeck has more than enough talent and experience to craft a solid, entertaining story out of what could've easily been a series of disjointed monologues. The simple act of throwing-in an unexplained shoebox full of money at the beginning of the show goes a long way towards creating an interesting world beyond Haley's monologue for the audience to latch on to. True, the story isn't particularly deep, but it's more than satisfying on the surface. In the end, you hardly notice 90 minutes have passed.
The Milwaukee Rep's production of "Bad Dates" runs through February 12th at the Stiemke Theater in the Patty and Jay Baker Theater Complex. Tickets range in price from $20-$40 and can be purchased by calling the ticket office at (414) 224-9490
