Girls & Boys, by Dennis Kelly (performed by Carey Mulligan)

If you are one of the 2.5 people who read my blog regularly, you may have noticed I haven't posted for a couple of months. I actually sat down to write about my August reading and realized I just had nothing new to say. So I decided I would only post when I had something I actually wanted to talk about . . . so here is my first post in the new regime.

Audible recently added a new "perk" for subscribers--two free Audible Originals every month. The first few I've downloaded have been a mixed bag, but all interesting in their own way. However, Girls & Boys stood out. Dennis Kelly wrote Girls & Boys as a one-woman play; it has been produced in London and New York, performed in both cities by Carey Mulligan.

For this Audible Original, the play has been modestly adapted to be, more or less, a radio play, again performed by Mulligan--and she is wonderful! It's surprising that a voice can tell a story so compellingly with no visuals and no information provided via anything other than the monologue. 

So what is Girls & Boys about?  It's a story of a marriage, from the moment the husband and wife (the narrator) meet until the marriage ends, complete with career ups and downs and the birth of two children. The story is interspersed with "scenes" in which the narrator is interacting with the children; of course, we only hear her voice, but every mother will recognize the tone of the interactions ("Danny, stop it!" "We'll play architect for 5 minutes, and then war."). The narrator is a documentary film producer, and one of the films she works on features the work of a scholar whose focus is gender and violence, prompting reflections on culture, violence, and men that are relevant to events as they develop in the marriage. I don't think I can say more without it becoming a spoiler.

Although some reviewers of the Off-Broadway version of Girls & Boys lauded Mulligan while finding the actual play flawed, I found it sufficiently interesting to listen a second time. While the audio version would be less compelling in another performer's hands, I think Girls & Boys would be interesting and thought-provoking no matter in what form you encountered it.

Favorite passage:

We didn't create society for men, we created it to stop men.