NEW YORK — The woman with the raw, luminous face has a story she wants to tell you. No, that’s not quite right. It’s a story she has to tell you, though the hard urgency of her narrative won’t be obvious at first. It is obvious she’ll deploy all the tools at her command — charm, aggression, the illusion of immediate intimacy — to keep your attention.
Because this woman is portrayed with unswerving focus by Carey Mulligan, one of the most compelling stage actresses of her generation, there is never any question of her not succeeding in this mission.
For the more than 100 uninterrupted minutes that make up Dennis Kelly’s “Girls & Boys,” in which Mulligan is the entire cast, you are unconditionally hers.
This is true even when you start to suspect that there is both more — and, fatally, less — to her character’s story than meets the eye. Afterward, when you’re out of the coercive range of Mulligan’s gaze, you’ll find yourself thinking that Kelly is one lucky playwright to have had her as his interpreter.
“Girls & Boys,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Minetta Lane Theater under the seamless direction of Lyndsey Turner, is a dark tease of a tale that never quite rises to its own, earnest ambitions. Despite its anodyne title, “Girls & Boys” considers the relationship between the sexes to explore the ways in which each is wired to create and destroy.
Or as Woman (that’s how Mulligan’s character is identified in the program) says, “I think a lot about violence.” She continues, “I just think it’s such a fundamental part of our species that how can you understand us without understanding it?”
There are reasons, needless to say, that she poses this question, including one of devastating relevance to her. Woman has done her research, and she conversationally folds in evidence that is academic as well as anecdotal, sociological as well as personal. Somehow, though, the answers never add up, nor do the details that convincingly define a life torn asunder.
Kelly — best known here for his impeccably quirky, Tony-winning book for the musical “Matilda” — has written a careful and intelligent script that covers many bases but lands on few of them with full impact. It begins as a fond portrait of a love affair and ends as a cold assessment of a tragedy, while implicitly wondering how one might have led to the other.
Mulligan’s character is a documentary maker and mother of two who describes the signal events of her adult life with a bright candor that she has clearly learned suits her. This comes across in both her account of how she won a hotly coveted job in television without much in the way of a résumé or experience and of how she met and fell for the man who would become her supportive husband.
These aspects of her life are described directly to the audience as Mulligan stands on an empty stage with nothing but her expressive frame and face to define the busy world she is conjuring. These scenes alternate with others in which she is dealing with the often tedious demands of her two young children, Leanne and Danny.
But while Es Devlin’s superb set, delicately lighted by Oliver Fenwick, has shifted to reveal a completely detailed living area, rendered in monochrome, Mulligan is again called upon to fill in blanks. Though Woman’s children are never seen, she tends to them with a present-tense and vividly precise physicality.
And in the play’s most chilling moment, as her character is balancing her attentions between a little boy who wants to play war and a girl who wants to play architect, Mulligan looks at us and says matter-of-factly, “I know they’re not here.”
That the boy is instinctively military, while the girl is drawn to more constructive and intellectual pursuits, posits a gender-based contrast in sensibilities. So does Woman’s account of a documentary she worked on, about an academic who basically theorizes that women should be running the world.
That theorist, by the way, is as a man. And the account of his behavior while collaborating on the documentary is evidence of Kelly’s welcome refusal to present any argument in pure black and white.
This is also true of Woman’s account of what led to the terrible events at the play’s center. Yet it is in this most crucial, central story that the script falters, lapsing into the conventions of true crime shows and police procedurals in which a forensic expert tries to explain imponderable acts.
Not that you’ll be entirely conscious of this failing while you’re watching Mulligan, though it may quietly nag at you. Audiences who know only her screen work (“Mudbound,” “The Great Gatsby”), haven’t experienced the full measure of the uncanny emotional translucence she emanates on stage.
That quality was what made her the best Nina I’ve seen in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” (on Broadway in 2008), and it infused her harrowing study of a schizophrenic in “Through a Glass Darkly” (off-Broadway in 2011). In “Girls & Boys,” she is required to shadow her natural, revelatory radiance.
But every so often, even in the midst of a jokey anecdote, Mulligan’s Woman stretches her long neck and tilts her chin upward. Her face fleetingly becomes one that has been stripped nearly to the skull by pain and guilt.
And you realize anew, with a startling pang, that this person doesn’t at all want to be talking about what she’s talking about. But, as Mulligan makes so achingly clear, she doesn’t have a choice.
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Production Notes:
‘Girls & Boys’
Through July 22 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; 800-982-2787, minettalanenyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
By Dennis Kelly; directed by Lyndsey Turner; sets by Es Devlin; costumes by Jack Galloway; lighting by Oliver Fenwick; video by Luke Halls; sound by David McSeveney; general management by FGTM/Joe Watson; movement director, Joseph Alford; production stage manager, William H. Lang; company manager, Bobby Driggers; artistic producer, Kate Navin. Presented by Minetta Lane Theater and Audible.
Cast: Carey Mulligan (Woman).
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.