Stalking Onstage

Girl is talked into a blind date with Boy. Girl thinks Boy is okay…maybe. Boy really likes Girl. Girl decides it would probably be best for all involved if things with Boy maybe ended about here. Boy disagrees, strongly. Boy calls Girl at work. Boy sends Girl flowers at work. Boy sends more flowers. Boy calls some more. Then, Boy finds out where Girl lives.

So begins the living nightmare for Theresa, a successful journalist, and the main character in the play Boy Gets Girl by prominent American playwright Rebecca Gilman. It's been picked up by the Black Swan Theatre company and by director Adam Mitchell, who, while researching for the play, was surprised both by how common stalking was (he's experienced a version of it, as have several members of the cast), and by how stalkers don't necessarily take the form of the mentally ill.

“When I first picked up the play, I thought of the stalker possibly being a sociopath or even a psychopath; someone having some fairly serious, I suppose, mental complexities. As it turns out, the average stalker is not necessarily suffering from a mental illness. It's just more of the pattern of the way they engage socially with people… I think that's how it's so common,” Mitchell says. “In a way, it makes it more scary, I think.”

The stalker in the context of this play is Tony: a computer programmer and, at the beginning, a fairly normal-seeming guy. Pleasant, if a little awkward. “It's billed as a play of suspense; a play about a stalker – a thriller,” Mitchell explains. “And I kind of feel like the nicer, the more likeable, the more wholesome Tony is at the beginning of the play, the bigger journey we have, and possibly the more sense of a surprise we have when he turns out not to be a wholesome American kid, as we first thought.” Because, by the end, Tony is revealed to be anything but. “You slowly see how this man infects every facet of Theresa's life. It's actually quite excruciating.”

Mitchell has been enjoying working with the thriller genre, and has been playing with the accompanying design implications. “We're doing a Hitchcock-esque treatment to the play; we're very much tipping our hats to film noir,” he says. “I can hear the alto saxophone echoing off the laneways in the wet New York Streets, you know, and those images are really evocative. So it's very exciting playing with the design aspects of a noir, and then of a thriller. You don't often get to see thrillers onstage. It seems to be more that film has pretty much exclusively stolen that genre.”

It's not all darkness, however. The play carries with it some humorous characters and lighter aspects. “The funny thing is that this is actually a very funny play,” the director insists. “I think this is why it's so skillful.” He goes on: “There's this ability that fear and laughter – they sit in the same place on the human being, so you can't have one without the other – you can't have light without the shade. And you can't have the drama without the humour, as well. So, I think that's what makes it such an exciting play. Hopefully you laugh, hopefully you're scared, and hopefully you'll pull out some of the ideas of the play as well.”