Fresh Ink’s ‘Girlish’ – Young Women to Watch

By Linda Chin

‘Girlish’ – Written by Alexa Derman; Directed by Melanie Garber; Scenic Design by Michelle Sparks; Lighting Design by Harrison Pearse Burke; Costume Design by Liz Fenstermaker; Sound Design by Benjamin Finn. Presented by Fresh Ink Theatre at the Plaza Blackbox at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St., Boston through February 16

Greater Boston’s theater companies do not generally plan their seasons in concert with each other, so in the cornucopia of play offerings by companies large, mid-size and small, professional/commercial and fringe, it is a jackpot when multiple stories featuring underrepresented demographics make it to the stage. With the Lyric Stage’s recent production of The Wolves, Company One-ART’s co-production of Miss You Like Hell, and Fresh Ink’s current production of Girlish, 2019 has already been a theatrical trifecta of teenage coming-of-age stories featuring very talented theater artists.

It has been a joy to watch Fresh Ink Theatre, whose mission since 2011 has been to develop new work with theatre artists in the New England area, come-of-age as a community of collaborators. Their works have been produced at the Factory Theatre, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and First Church Boston, and is now one of the companies in residence at the Boston Center for the Arts. For Girlish, BCA’s Plaza Blackbox has been transformed into a girl’s bedroom, with plush bedding and wallpaper in various shades of pink, and a bookcase lining the back of the stage filled with American Girl dolls. The doll collection is not a dusty vestige of days past, but very much part of their owner, Windy’s, present life. Actor Atlee Jensen brings strong acting skills to her characterization of a 15-year old teenager who is painfully anxious and is happy to be a sidekick but sparkles as an American Girl Instagrammer. Windy identifies most with AG Samantha Parkington, in terms of her bookishness, Edwardian-era style of dress and sensibilities, and loyal, giving and helpful nature. Windy has even cut her hair in girly, straight across the forehead bangs to match Samantha’s hairstyle. Windy’s lifelong best friend is Marti, who presents as the more sophisticated and cool-girl of the pair. Marti trims Windy’s bangs with the scissors she uses to trim her pubic hair, and freely dispenses advice about makeup and menstruation, and the right clothes and the right messages (text and other) to send to boys in order to get a date and get kissed. Marti can come on a little too strong at times, and is played by actor Willa Eigo with the right balance of tough and tender.

Jensen and Eigo are each very believable in conveying adolescent angst, and in their scenes together they show great chemistry. Like any friendship, theirs includes misunderstandings and moments of tension large and small. They get into a big struggle about lipliner. In another instance, Marti considers Windy’s connection with the dolls a childish obsession, and grows increasingly frustrated by Windy’s insistence that their friendship is analogous to the one between Samantha and her best friend, Nellie O’Malley. At one point Marti questions whether Windy is so stuck on comparing her to Nellie because she is not white. To those (including myself) who are not followers of the American Girl series, Nellie is dark-haired and her American Girl backstory is that she is an immigrant from Ireland (in those days, outsiders who are not white) whose family members were domestic workers to the white upper-class. Girlish touches on race by creating (and casting) the characters of Windy as white and Marti as Asian-American (as per the character breakdown, Jensen and Eigo are Caucasian and Asian-American respectively) but these concepts of race are not fully developed in the script or staging as they might have been. My other quibble with the staging is that in many scenes the entire width of the stage was used, with characters at opposite ends. With several rows of audience seated close to the stage, watching one character (far stage left) meant missing the wonderful reactions of the other (far stage right).

Like many close friendship pairs, the inclusion of a third party can be an intrusion. The third character is a 19-year old boy (Dylan C. Wack) who follows the American Girl site, using the identifier AGBO197. The mood thickens when he and Windy start sexting, and when Marti reveals her burgeoning (possibly queer) sexuality. Girlish may seem like a quiet, small play, but it is a complex comedy-drama about the ebbs and flows of friendship, how we grow up, grow apart, and come together, that most people should relate to, regardless of age, or gender, or girlishness.

In the New Play Exchange, the Girlish playwright’s single paragraph bio lists multiple national honors, bookended by the first sentence: Alexa Derman writes about young women and closing sentence: BA in Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies from Yale. In her bio in Yale College Arts Derman’s performance and production page lists multiple stints as dramaturg, producer, writer, make-up artist, and the wonderful caption to her photo: Alexa Derman, Berkeley (residential college), 2018, ASK ME ABOUT BEING [a neurotic and disorganized lesbian feminist playwright] AT YALE. In case you didn’t catch that, Derman wrote the play as an undergraduate, and it premiered in October 2017. That explains her personal understanding of the vernacular of teenage girls, the exploration of race, burgeoning sexuality, the way technology helps and hurts human connections. It doesn’t explain Derman’s mastery of her craft, or a bio that artists many years her senior would wish for.

Derman. Jensen. Eigo.  Young women to watch. For tickets and info, go to: http://freshinktheatre.org/