Theater: All the Fine Boys: fifteen year old girls experience lust, love, and downfall

Erica Schmidt’s new play All the Fine Boys takes a decidedly female perspective on adolescent development, with mixed results. It centers on two 14-15 year old girls, (played here by the 20’ish Isabelle Fuhrman and Abigail Breslin (the junior beauty pageant star Olive in filmdom’s Little Miss Sunshine). Each has an experience with an older boy/man, with very mixed results. The play begins with a prelude—a giggly slumber party where the Jenny and Emily talk about boys, watch explicit horror films (helpfully left by Jenny’s mother), and do typical teenage things. The rest of the play unfolds their respective relationships with a 17 year old high school artsy rebel (well played by Alex Wolff) and a 28 year old married man. Despite their close friendship, Jenny and Emily oddly do not share much information as these relationships evolve; each is on a solo adventure, and one ends very badly indeed. Like some teen films, the males play a lesser role, cast as negative foils to the girls. Unlike those teen films, the plot is not just devised to keep a lurid, male-audience driven eye on female anatomy. Instead, the 40’ish playwright explores the girls’ perspective. The play does a good job at depicting the girls’ innocence, so when they are eventually manipulated and betrayed by the men (only one of whom is seeking sex), you feel real discomfort at the too-rapid pace of their sexual evolution. That said, I did not sense a real point to this play, which mixed plot devices that pushed us towards sympathy to the girls with others that made them less sympathetic. Ambiguity is terrific in my book, but it should be conscious and carefully engineered to make us question the characters’ motives at each stage. Here it seemed random and I was left guessing at what point the playwright sought to convey.

The performance was limited by the two protagonists’ not really appearing to be 15, particularly Ms. Breslin. Her raspy voice, forceful projection and body type did not help us to suspend our disbelief. Ms. Fuhrman, who ends up wiser and cynical about relationships, does much better. The great challenge of this sort of play is how to make the audience experience maximal age-mismatch queasiness (as Nabokov’s Lolita does by using our imaginations) while relying on visibly of-age actors to portray underage protagonists. Here I never really believed that the girls were fifteen. Ms. Fuhrman had the greater acting range and I was moved by her experience with the high school boy, replete with sweet unrealistic expectations and fantasy, further enhanced by the subtle acting of her confident-yet-insecure male partner. In contrast Ms. Breslin, who has the more tragic and melodramatic role, never really convinced me that or why she fell for the older man, and the male actor did not convey enough sexual appeal to convince me how a 15 year old girl would fall for him. The dialogue for the younger couple was fairly nuanced and conveyed adolescent emotion well, but the older relationship rapidly fell into TV clichés. While All the Fine Boys is a commendable effort to portray the angst of female adolescence from a female perspective, the play ultimately falls short in lacking a coherently projected point of view and in its stereotyped writing for the emotions behind a winter-spring (summer-spring?) relationship.