Playwright: Theresa Rebeck
At: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd. in Skokie
Phone: 847-673-6300; $34-$56
Runs through: Jan. 7
Our hostess and narrator is Haley—pronounced 'hay-lee', as in Mills— Walker, a thirtysomething divorced mother from Texas who has worked her way up from waitress to manager of a fashionable restaurant run by a Romanian godfather. She and her surly teenaged daughter ( whom we never see ) live in a spacious rent-controlled upper Manhattan apartment. Walker is thin, blonde and obsessed with footwear—she owns, by her own estimate, 600 pairs of shoes, only three of which ( excluding the 24 pairs of slippers in the door hanger on the one closet ) are suitable for standing, walking or any other pedestrian function. This gives her a toddler-like gait when she plays patty-pedal in her swivel-base boudoir chair or trips daintily into clouds of perfume spray.
If this is the 'snapshot of an American life' promised in the publicity for Theresa Rebeck's one-woman show Bad Dates, it's America according to Sex In The City, where women hold down high-powered jobs but conduct themselves like idle socialites. Rebeck devotes most of her play to Walker sharing girlish secrets with us while dressing for, or undressing after, dates with the usual kissing-frogs princes, the latter's repugnant traits consolidated into often-contradictory personalities for the sake of dramatic brevity. When one of these nerds rescues our Cinderella after her shady business practices come to light, however, his faults suddenly disappear—never to be reconciled, forgiven or even mentioned.
You heard that right, by the way—'shady business practices.' In order to keep up the pretense of legality for her employer's money-laundering establishment, Walker has been cooking the books and skimming herself—and her child, of course—a tidy little sum. But as played by the sitcom-savvy Beth Broderick, under the slick direction of Judith Ivey, Haley could confess to serial murder in her cute country-fried accent and we would still declare her as lovable as a basket of kittens. As long as an embezzler is surrounded by the icons of feminine innocence, envious female audiences will happily put their morals on hold to revel in the infantile fantasy of no-cost, designer-label happy-ever-afters.