'Bad Dates' at the Straz Center in Tampa is boring

By MARTY CLEAR

Times Correspondent

TAMPA — You probably know people like Haley Walker. She's the type who loves to talk about herself, and she's unaware that her stories aren't very interesting.

Haley's the sole character in Theresa Rebeck's popular stage comedy Bad Dates. The play consists entirely of her telling stories about herself, speaking directly to the audience for an hour and a half.

There's a difference between Haley and your self-centered acquaintances, though. When your friends prattle on about their mundane lives, you can change the subject or excuse yourself.

When you're in the audience at the Shimberg Playhouse, where the Stageworks production of Bad Dates runs through Dec. 6, you're stuck. You can't leave (there's no intermission) and you can't tell Haley how dull and inconsequential she and her stories are.

Haley, played by Jessica Rothert in a performance that's wonderful but wasted, is a single mother of a teen daughter. She manages a Manhattan restaurant and she really, really, really enjoys talking about her shoes.

We meet her as she dresses for her first date in years. The guy turns out to be a bit of a jerk. Then she goes on another date. That guy also turns out to be a bit of a jerk. Then a third date. That guy turns out to be a big jerk. We hear about them all in great detail.

Despite the play's title, the dates aren't all that bad. They're just not very good. Virtually everyone you know has had dates far worse than these, and can tell much more entertaining stories about disastrous dates. But you still wouldn't want to spend 90 minutes listening to them.

Rothert is fresh, lively and appealing, even though Haley is about as interesting as a pair of dirty socks. The performance, directed by Rosemary Orlando, is self-assured and fluid, and Rebeck's dialogue (well written, despite the banality of the stories) flows gracefully. Orlando has Rothert moving almost constantly, which helps make the proceedings somewhat less tedious, but the movement never seems forced and never interferes with the narrative.

T.J. Ecenia has designed an attractive set, but it's laughably large for Manhattan bedroom of a restaurant manager who's supporting a kid. More significantly, it doesn't tell us anything about Haley.

But the direction, the performance and the design can't save a play consisting almost entirely of a boring character telling boring stories about boring evenings.