Our New Girl
Opening Night: June 10, 2014
Closing: June 29, 2014
Theater: Atlantic Theater
Hazel Robinson appears to have everything, but when her plastic surgeon husband departs for a charitable mission in Haiti, she’s left holding the bag of a failing new business and a problem child. When a professional nanny arrives unannounced on her doorstep, Hazel finds her home under the shadow of a seemingly perfect stranger and one who has an agenda of her own.
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June 10, 2014
The brief opening scene of Nancy Harris’ Our New Girl, described by the Atlantic Theater Company as a psychological thriller, contains one of those chilling moments that causes audience members to impulsively gasp, avert their eyes or feel the tingle of their own hairs standing on end. It immediately leaps into a confrontation scene that heightens interest in where exactly the Irish playwright is going. Alas, by the play’s unclear conclusion it seems that she’s going nowhere thrilling and perhaps only a tad psychological. Taking place in the kitchen a well-off British couple (fine work by set designer Timothy R. Mackabee), the evening concerns the troubled relationship between plastic surgeon Richard (CJ Wilson) and his wife, Hazel (Mary McCann), a former lawyer struggling to make a profit with her at-home business selling imported olive oil. (The increasing abundance of boxes of the stuff comes off as an attempt at a running gag.)
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June 10, 2014
Wondering what the most suspenseful moment is in New York theatre right now? It occurs in Our New Girl, the play by Nancy Harris that just opened at Atlantic Stage 2. Spoiler alert: It involves one character holding a chair for another. Hmm, that doesn’t sound too nail-biting in writing, does it? But trust me, as an integral element of Nancy Harris’s surprisingly absorbing play and Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s sharply honed production, the situation will leave you on the edge of your seat and perhaps even gasping or shielding your eyes. (Yes, both things happened at the performance I attended.) The accomplishment here from Harris, an Irish playwright whose work is new to New York, isn’t that she’s able to send chills up and down your spine with clockwork regularity. It’s that she’s able to do so without deploying traditional components of horror like a haunted house, unexpected loud noises, ghosts, or monsters (though, come to think of it, a tarantula is a minor supporting character), but instead by recasting everyday disturbances in uniquely unsettling ways.
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Nancy Harris certainly knows how to put the parts together for a creepy-crawly experience. Our New Girl, her play at Atlantic II, could be regarded as Mary Poppins meets The Bad Seed meets Turn of the Screw with a glancing God of Carnage acquaintanceship. The problem flares when she doesn’t quite suss out what to do with the elements once she’s got them in place. The first thing she shows you is young Daniel (10-year-old Henry Kelemen) in the dead of night moving about a good-looking London kitchen Timothy R. Mackabee has designed. Just when it looks as if the methodical lad is going to cut off his right ear Vincent Van Gogh-like with a hefty knife, the teaser scene ends. Next thing you know, very pregnant Hazel (Mary McCann) is in the now day-lighted kitchen telling Annie (Lisa Joyce), who has a valise by her side, that no, she has no need for Annie’s services as a nanny and, anyway, she had no idea one was arriving out of the blue. Annie explains it was Hazel’s absent-in-Haiti dermatologist husband Richard (CJ Wilson) who arranged for a nanny’s services.
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June 10, 2014
First impressions aren’t everything. Over the course of two intense hours at Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, your flash judgments are likely to make a complete 180 with Nancy Harris’ brilliant new play, Our New Girl. Your blood will boil throughout, first at a simmer and then at a fever pitch. Under the deft direction of Gaye Taylor Upchurch, the four-person ensemble takes the audience into an impossibly frustrating situation and forces us to live there. Feeling this angry rarely feels as enlightening as it does here. The story takes place in the eat-in kitchen of a posh London home. Subtle light penetrates the sheer drapes hanging over the above-the-sink window and gleams off the stainless steel appliances (brilliantly naturalistic lighting by David Weiner). Little bottles of olive oil congregate in strategic colonies all over the room. A giant Rorschach-esque painting hangs on the exposed stone of the upstage wall. With this not-too-subtle touch, scenic designer Timothy R. Mackabee seems to be suggesting that our perceptions of this play will say a lot more about us than it will about the people depicted.
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June 10, 2014
Your sympathies are constantly shifting as you watch Our New Girl, a drama by the Irish-born writer Nancy Harris that cross-pollinates two very different genres. On the one hand, Ms. Harris’s London-set play, which opened at the Atlantic Theater Company’s smaller stage on Tuesday night, is a serious study of a well-heeled but harassed contemporary woman trying to keep her marriage and family from fraying. At the same time, Ms. Harris stocks her play with the classic elements of a thriller: a sullen child who may harbor violent impulses, a comely nanny who may not be as innocent as she appears. And let’s not forget that tarantula. Actually the spider, which makes only a cameo or two, is the only character in the play who remains entirely likable (assuming you have nothing against arachnids). The others gain and lose our affections as the plot heats up, sometimes in ways more pulpy than plausible.
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