Nice Girl: Theater review by Adam Feldman
Two years ago, Diane Davis made a powerful impression as the obscenely monstrous daughter of a retired couple in The Model Apartment. As the title character in Melissa Ross’s absorbing Nice Girl, she’s equally persuasive—less shocking but subtle and touching—as a very different woman at odds with her elderly mother. Davis plays Josephine, who shares a home in suburban Boston with her long-widowed, dependent, housebound mom, Francine (Kathryn Kates); it is 1984, and Josephine, at 37, has all but resigned herself to spinsterhood. The flirtation of a neighborhood butcher (Nick Cordero) and the encouragement of a vivacious work friend (Liv Rooth) give her a new lease on life—but leasing is not the same as owning.
In Mimi O’Donnell’s sensitive staging for Labyrinth Theater Company (on a terrific set by David Meyer), Josephine is sympathetic but not maudlin, and Ross is refreshingly unhurried in depicting her plight. The dialogue gives the characters room to breathe, though it occasionally strays from 1980s idiom, and Davis pulls off the difficult feat of making shyness dramatically compelling, suggesting wheels of emotion turning behind the mostly placid surface. Nice Girl does take one major false turn—a contrivance as predictable as it is far-fetched—and its ending is needlessly ambiguous. But the play works: It draws your attention to a woman who would not presume to command it.—Adam Feldman
Bank Street Theater (Off Broadway). By Melissa Ross. Directed by Mimi O’Donnell. With Diane Davis, Kathryn Kates. Running time: 1hr 55mins. One intermission.
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