E-Mail This Article to a Friend Stalking feat Merrimack gets Boy Gets Girl BY SALLY CRAGIN

No one in his or her right mind would want to live in Rebecca Gilman’s world, but it’s a damned interesting place to visit. The Alabama-bred, Chicago-based playwright is fascinated by how far people will go when pushed, and pushing hot-button issues has become her stock in trade. In Spinning into Butter, which the Theater Cooperative introduced to the region last year, her central character is a young female dean at a sheltered New England college. When a black student reports racial threats, Sarah Matthews has to confront bigotry on campus — and in her own heart.

In Boy Gets Girl, which is now in rehearsal at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, the playwright contrives an equally complex and troubled heroine. Theresa Bedell is a brittle New York magazine editor who goes on a blind date. Tension mounts when her one-time dinner companion transforms into a stalker. But Boy Gets Girl has unexpected twists, and when Theresa becomes traumatized, she becomes increasingly difficult to like.

"I like that her lead character is flawed," says Merrimack artistic director Charles Towers, who’s helming the production. "Usually, if you’re going to have a central character who’s a victim, your heart is going to go out to them in every way." Not so with Theresa, who feuds with co-workers, patronizes an employee, and insults an interview subject (granted, a Russ Meyer–esque filmmaker named Les Kennkat who’s less than sympathetic).

"You see this woman on a date in this vulnerable situation to start with," says Gloria Biegler, who plays Theresa, "and the way she talks there is completely different from how she talks in the office. Theresa has had to learn to be in the business world, and she’s learned it well." Biegler has found the part exhausting to explore. "I’m tired after a day of rehearsal because, emotionally, it’s a lot to go through." In Boy Gets Girl, Theresa is on stage almost non-stop, and that gives the audience a chance to ask whether she doesn’t bring some of her problems upon herself. Is it true, as Tony (her stalker) claims, that she’s "afraid of intimacy or something"? Or are her actions excusably self-protective?

Towers thinks that "the point is finding the darkness in us. You don’t go to Macbeth and say, ‘Oh, those Scots, aren’t they a violent people?’ You want to come away and say, ‘What in me would possess me to murder somebody?’ "

Although Gilman has been getting a lot of buzz, New Englanders haven’t seen much of her work. For Towers, bringing the not-yet-seen to area audiences is part of the mission at Merrimack Rep. "My interests are two-fold in doing newer work. The first is prosaic. When I got here two and a half years ago, this was a theater in severe financial trouble." Modestly sized productions were more economical, and as Towers puts it, "Our inside mantra is ‘Small but excellent.’ "

But he also rejects the notion that theatergoers crave work they already know. "Maybe I’ve seen too many productions of Twelfth Night or The Importance of Being Earnest, and I just can’t anymore. But I’ve always wondered about the American theater, if we are making ourselves redundant by doing mostly revivals. Why not do writers who are living?"

Boy Gets Girl is at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, 50 East Merrimack Street in Lowell, October 23 through November 16. Tickets are $23 to $39; call (978) 454-3926 or visit www.merrimackrep.org.