The Shape of a Girl

The cautionary message about girl-on-girl teen bullying at the heart of the solo play Shape of a Girl has a luridly disturbing topic and a ridiculously broad appeal going for it. Is there a culture somewhere that doesn’t have doppelgängers for Mean Girls? Yet even with its considerable integrity, this efficient, sometimes stridently humorless hormone oratorio rings like an NBC “The More You Know” celebrity PSA spot: inarguably important, clear in its thesis, evergreen in its urgency and oddly difficult to know whom exactly its creators think it’s for.

Bradie, a cool and sad 15-year-old mop top with painful buried memories of menacing intragender violence, finds her secrets rushing to the surface when she hears a news account of an Australian girl-thug incident. With emotions as big as scenic designers Richard and Jacqueline Penrod’s beach-and-fence expanse, Bradie addresses us in dreamy, moody teen journal-speak to reveal someone who once found herself swept by a cold front of peer pressure into taunting a fellow student, leaving all parties black-and-blue in every sense. Cleanly and professionally penned, it reverberates with an eat-your-vegetables mission that seeks to educate with its brutal subject matter but offers no innovative point of view. Some teens may like it; some concerned parents, more still. But the attention span required of the audience isn’t matched by the material’s ingenuity.

In glass-half-full news, Shape has something no other play in the city currently offers: Alice Wedoff. With director Duncan as her slow-dance partner, this tough and tender actor (recently the quivering ingenue in TUTA’s Romeo and Juliet) hooks MacLeod’s natural rhythms and cadences and bends them any way that feels right. Even without the help of lights, she’s a performer who can change colors in front of you.

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