Girls & Boys (Oberon Modern Plays): A Play

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I'm not sure that I agree with all the conclusions that the author came to in this play. Some of it rings true, while other things are debatable. What I found absolutely brave was that Dennis Kelly had the nerve to ask those questions. The balls. I’ve met people who have had terrible things happen to them almost on a par with this. What always impresses me is their ability to put one foot in front of the other. You’d think an unimaginable tragedy would make you curl up in a ball, but people don’t. They get up, they move and they continue.” Review: I never read or listen to a book twice, as I'm too scared of missing out on an amazing new read and I also worry that I may not enjoy a story as much the second time round. But I remember loving this one and I couldn't remember the ending so gave it another listen, and I'm so glad I did. This is my definitely my all-time favorite free audible original. Book Genre: British Literature, Contemporary, Dark, Drama, European Literature, Feminism, Fiction, Plays, Short Stories, Theatre The vast majority of murderers and sex offenders are men. We have to conclude that elements of masculinity are a problem for society. Dennis Kelly

New York City offers plenty of excellent acting courses, but there is no finer master class currently available than the one being presented eight times a week at the Minetta Lane Theatre. It’s there that Carey Mulligan delivers an unforgettable performance in Dennis Kelly’s one-person play Girls & Boys. For anyone interested in the art of stage acting, attendance is mandatory. An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn. The whole idea of “cancel culture”, he says, is based on a “terrible term”. “It’s not about people being ‘cancelled’. It’s about what we might be doing to people’s ability to say things, you know, people might just be scared to f***ing say things. In Girls & Boys, as in his unnerving pseudo-docudrama on infanticide, Taking Care of Baby (at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2013), Kelly is obsessed with spasms of violence in the home. He also wrote the book to the Broadway hit Matilda, but his sardonic take on parents and kiddies was filtered through Roald Dahl’s own cheery misanthropy. Kelly sometimes laces his tales with fake sociological theories to plumb the darker side of the human psyche. In Taking Care of Baby, he invented a syndrome which accounts for mothers driven to kill their offspring. Here, the Woman is producing a documentary about an academic building a system to limit male power in society. But by the end of her grim personal history, she has come to the realization: “We didn’t create society for men. We created it to stop men.”

The 51-year-old has a frank, unfiltered way of delivering opinions that may owe something to his upbringing in a large family – he’s the middle child of five born to working-class Irish parents in north London.

The audiobook concludes with words spoken by Dennis Kelly. He tells us why he wrote the play and what he has attempted to achieve. What he says gives one food for thought. I don’t remember exactly when things with us started to go properly wrong – I just remember suddenly finding myself in it.”I suggest if you are going to listen to this production that you take the 1 hour and 40 minutes, sit down and give this your full attention with no interruptions as if you were sitting in a theatre.

An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn. A tragic, violent look at parenthood and trauma. Girls and Boys by Dennis Kelly – eBook Details In particular, there’s a missed opportunity to explore gender and marital competition, and the way that men’s support for their partners can turn into rage when the women become more successful. Often, that story is told from the point of view of the man, but Girls & Boys is instead seen through a wife who outpaces her husband and then finds she no longer recognizes him. That’s a fascinating subject for a play, one that has room for internal conflict, inappropriate sentiments, thematic thorniness. All of these qualities are missing from Girls & Boys. For a play that begins with the kind of laugh-out-loud raunch that viewers of Ali Wong’s recent comedy specials will find familiar, it turns out to be remarkably tame, tasteful, and all-too-appropriate when the subject matter turns weighty. In just 70 minutes, all alone on an aqua-coloured stage, Carey Mulligan takes us from ribald laughter to icy devastation. With the play’s title as an unsubtle clue, Kelly is telling us something about girls and boys, women and men. As for the latter, the woman’s husband turns out to be a monster from a slasher movie. He’s great sex in the beginning. The woman tells us that if you’ve never experienced this kind of phenomenal lovemaking, then take it from her: Drop your current partner immediately and go get laid. But then the husband’s career nose-dives just when the woman’s is taking off.Facing up to what he has written can be a challenge for Kelly. He recently saw a “really good” French production of his play Girls and Boys (a one-hander performed in Britain in 2018 by Carey Mulligan), he tells me, but confesses: “I don’t know if I can ever see that again. I mean, I’ve got a two-and-a-half-year-old now.” Infanticide is at the heart of the play. “I’m glad I wrote it, but I probably couldn’t do it now. I just can’t let my mind go to those places.” What the woman has to say in her blue-box monologues isn’t very scintillating or clever, which may lead you to wonder if the children, whom we never see, are real or imaginary. An upstage door does open and shut when we’re told the little girl is going to her bedroom. This macabre wonderment on our part makes the monologues easier to endure. The other thing that piques interest is how much the woman prefers her daughter to her son. He feels the same way about the heart-stopping school massacre in the Channel 4 drama Utopia, which ran for two series between 2013-14, and was reworked with an American slant by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn for Prime Video in 2020. The first episode aired just weeks after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in the US, in which 20 children and six members of staff were killed. “There’s no way I’d write that now, I just think it would be irresponsible.”