Bad Dates , Program Notes
“I spend a lot of time thinking about America, who we are as a people and a culture and a nation, and I have always felt that the theatre is a truly appropriate place to examine these issues . . . I am a woman, I am an American, I am a mother, I sometimes write for television, and I sometimes write movies; I play the piano, I knit, I rail at the universe; I am angry, I am sad; I am a comic realist, a misanthrope, and an idealist. There are many ways to categorize me, and my work. But for myself, I would most like to be considered a playwright.”
—Theresa Rebeck, introduction to Complete Plays 1989-1998
Before Theresa Rebeck became a playwright, she pursued a marginally safer career: literary scholar. She titled her Ph.D. dissertation on Victorian melodrama: “Your Cries Are in Vain”, the line mustachioed villains declaimed while tying hapless maidens to railroad tracks. Her doctorate complete, Rebeck attempted playwriting, although, as she put it, “Catholic girls from Cincinnati do not write plays.” The gamble paid off, leading to lucrative stints on NYPD Blue and Law and Order, and a body of theatrical work that includes Loose Knit, Spike Heels, a Broadway production last season of her play Mauritius, and the current Off Broadway production of her new play, Our House.
The idea for her most popular play, Bad Dates, was born in a Los Angeles backyard, during a conversation with her friend, actress Julie White. White was a single mother at the time, and had begun dating again with disappointing results. “We got to talking about what seemed to be a good idea: a cable series about bad dates using dramatic re-creations of real life experiences...Julie and I as co-hosts would toss the situation around. Figure out alternate endings, maybe. Like what if she crawled out the bathroom window? The series idea faded...but the basic idea stayed with me, and took off as a play. Bad Dates (starring Julie White) started out at Playwrights Horizons, a small theater...then transferred to the Huntington Theatre in Boston — 900 seats, and became a sensation, the biggest moneymaker in the company’s history. Even the theater insiders who hate everything loved it.” And now Rebeck has lost track of its numerous productions: “But I understand that it’s being done in Brazil with a Rio TV star playing Haley.
”Rebeck says the play’s success has to do with the psychological reactions audiences have to a comedic universe. “There’s something quite peculiar about the way the pieces fall together,” she says. “And in a play like this, things are slightly negotiated. I went back and looked at all those old Shakespeare comedies, because there’s something unreal about them: this happened, and then this, and so now there’s a happy ending. There’s this sort of frothy feeling of delight when the pieces come together and everything’s okay.”
“As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me. I am a feminist in that I believe that women are as fully human as men and that their experiences are as worthy of representation, as universally significant, as men’s. I believe that the hero’s journey is both male and female. I believe that, as a rule, women are as deeply flawed as men are. I’m interested in writing about the way both genders make mistakes and the ways we grow, or don’t grow."
Bad Dates tracks Rebeck’s hero, a single mother from Austin, Texas (Julie White’s hometown), transplanted to New York City, who has decided to start dating again, and must deal with her own issues, prejudices and preconceptions before she can accept someone else into her life. Rebeck adroitly captures the friction between Haley’s experiences with men, and her hopes and fears; and though comically unfortunate things happen to her, her cries are not in vain.
Women on high heels:
Heels have gone about as far as they can go. Nine-inch heels with four-inch platforms is usually the cut-off point. We’ve witnessed this moment before, in the Seventies, in the Eighties, and in the Nineties. Now is the towering shoe moment of the Noughties, which will be followed by the inevitable fall.
—Germaine Greer
The thing that fascinates me about high heels (which I adore) is that men have also worn them as a fashion statement – not because, like Sarkozy, they were physically challenged. Although it is often said that Louis XIV wore high heels to enhance his height, this is quite untrue. He wore them because they were elegant. How I wish I could wear one of those fabulous pairs of black stilettos with flashing red soles by Christian Louboutin. But I’m afraid the result would be the following: “Lady biographer bites dust.”
—Lady Antonia Fraser
Height does indeed equal power in a man’s world – which is how shrimpy Napoleon’s name ended up on a complex. I don’t blame women for boosting their height – it’s a shrewd social strategy to see and be seen. But long-term mutilation of a crucial body part is inevitable for the compulsive fashionista.
—Camille Paglia
—Camille Paglia
