Theater Can Be Dishearteningly Inaccessible. Carey Mulligan’s Devastating New Play Is Changing That.

“I met my husband in a queue to board an EasyJet flight,” begins Carey Mulligan in Dennis Kelly’s play Girls & Boys, currently playing at the Minetta Lane Theatre. It’s a light-enough first line, but this is no meet-cute opening to a rom-com. Her future husband, she tells us, is approached by some gamine queue-cutters looking to bypass the ordeal that is modern air travel. “We just wanna stay here with you and chat for a bit,” they say, flirting. Standing behind her future husband, Mulligan’s character seethes in barely suppressed fury. Will this sanguine dolt be swayed by these misplaced models who have strayed from their VIP travel itinerary? “I get to sleep with one of you, right?” he deadpans, and Mulligan falls in love with him.

What follows is Mulligan’s recounting of their relationship, his booming business, a brash job interview that changes the course of her professional life, the boss who gives her a chance, and the colleague with whom she capitalizes on that chance to build something of her own. The play is no résumé of accomplishments, however, it’s delivered with chatty, off-the-cuff bonhomie; she’s a friend in a pub, two pints in, enjoying the rollicking ride that is her life.

Between the stretches in this one-woman tour de force that push the play through the characters’ lives, the scenery changes abruptly, and Mulligan, whose movement has been confined to a few steps back and forth at the front of the stage, is suddenly kneeling, crouching, and dashing across a mostly monochromatic apartment. She’s in pursuit of two invisible children, Leanne and Danny, whose hijinks exasperate and entertain her, ping-ponging her between states of fury and devotion. If the straight-to-the-audience monologues skipped through Mulligan’s character’s life, refracting the turning points that make it progress, this is a study in the other way we pass our time: a frenetic circling in a small space. There are many footsteps, many emotions, but if there is forward movement it is of a very different kind.

When she performed the role in London earlier this year, Mulligan was commended for her miming skills, and she does cup the knee-high shoulders of her invisible interlocutors, wipe the baby food from their imaginary faces, and usher their not-present bodies toward the garden with their buckets of mud. But her interactions, while one-sided, are profoundly verbal, a transcript of the running conversation you have when you care for young children. A large part of that commentary is an indirect comment on the distinctions between—you guessed it—boys and girls. Her daughter wants to play “architect,” while her son imagines a hellscape involving nuclear bombs, Godzilla, and the Taliban. Danny breaks things; Leanne cries. Elsewhere in the play, Mulligan alludes to these differences, hypothesizing idly that there is something inherently violent in male nature.

The assumption, dropped amid the cheerful stories of burgeoning careers and domestic scenes of stressful sweetness, that there is hidden unspeakable violence in the world, provides the pivot for the play. It’s a pivot so dramatic that it’s almost impossible to talk about without spoiling the second half. But let’s just say that a play that begins in one register takes a very different tack and ends up in a place so shattering that it is difficult to witness. There are a few moments in which Mulligan breaks down the third wall and fleetingly engages with the audience. “I mean, if I collapse right here, tonight,” Mulligan says, “you’ll all look after me. You will. You will do that.” With these asides, she’s invoking her witnesses, but also her supporters, the people in the room who have come to hear her story and sustain her. But the most direct-to-audience soliloquy is both a warning and a reassurance: “If it gets difficult—and it will get difficult—I want you to remember two things: Remember that this did not happen to you and that it is not happening now.” It’s rare that a play is so confident of its impact that it interrupts itself to issue a warning.

I found that pivot somewhat disorienting, and not just because it shifts the play so dramatically, but because it seems to come from nowhere. This is crucial to its impact, of course, and may be intentional: The events that this play covers are filtered entirely through one woman’s consciousness. The lens is singular and biased, and perhaps blind to any foreshadowing that would have created greater anticipation of the event. But no matter if you buy into the plausibility of the twist, there is no denying the powerfully persuasive performance by Mulligan.

It’s exciting to herald this performance because it’s available not just to the few who can make it to Greenwich Village during the short run of the play. (It closes July 22.) Audible is responsible for bringing the play to Minetta Lane, and it has also made a recording available to anyone with an account. As a further foray into theater, the audiobook company has also invested $5 million in an emerging playwrights’ fund. With Minetta Lane’s limited capacity and the play’s short run, it’s true that only a lucky few will get to witness Mulligan’s wrenching performance in the flesh, but Audible’s project (though lacking the disarming physicality of the play and the elegantly shifting set) offers a new mechanism for wider exposure for a play that certainly deserves it.