Riveting and poised as she recounts the most horrendous story, Carey Mulligan is the one-woman center of Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys at the Minetta Lane Theater, a superb Audible production and Royal Court Theater transplant. Minetta Lane must be ground zero for one-actor tours de force. Witness Billy Crudup’s brilliant turn as Harry Clarke. Dimpled Mulligan in maroon trousers and burnt sienna shirt, against a bare stage, or ghostly living space that colors up as needed, for an hour and three quarters: you can’t take your eyes off her, as she asserts herself shifting from leg to leg under Lyndsey Turner’s fine direction. You hear only about the sensational tales of domestic violence, she says preparing you, as she, dry eyed and wise comes to the play’s climax. You already know it, and it’s shocking nonetheless, the play’s final sentence, a chilling line that could work broadly in our #MeToo moment, roughly: civilization was created to stop men.

Ah Carey Mulligan! So great in Skylight, maybe the last stage play I saw her in. Mostly we know her from her movies, as Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Irene in Drive, to pick out a few. Nicolas Winding Refn told me that he cast her opposite Ryan Gosling in that movie because she struck him as totally vulnerable: “I wanted to protect her,” he said. See her in the upcoming Wildlife, as wife to Jake Gyllenhaal. Brave, wounded women are her specialty.

Regina Weinreich

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