Fear lives next door to ‘The Girl From 2A’
The Collective Project’s sexy, slow-burning psychological thriller will leave you spooked and perplexed.
- Justin Hadley
- UNINVITED GUEST: Dru Jamieson
No curtain speech opens The Collective Project’s The Girl From 2A, and no curtain call follows it. Audiences don’t even receive a program for James McDougald’s psychological thriller, and the absence of the usual theater rituals increased the ominous atmosphere of the imaginative but perplexing play (funded primarily through $3,000 raised on Kickstarter).
Directed by Corey Bradberry in the 7 Stages Backstage Theatre, The Girl From 2A takes place in an apartment in an unidentified city, but instead of walls, the backdrop of streaked tarp suggests that a cave or abandoned warehouse contains a young woman’s kitchen and living room furniture. The eponymous character of The Girl From 2A is a young woman named Gillian (Johanna Burgess Hardy), who works as a temp when she can bring herself to leave the apartment.
Drawn and hungry-looking, Gillian puzzles over the mysterious envelopes that arrive at her door. When coughing fits seize her, or she repeatedly moves her whistling teakettle off the burner, the deliberate repetitions make the days blur together and increase the sense that Gillian lacks a firm grip on reality. We slowly get fragments of information involving Gillian’s twin, a railroad accident and an enigmatic, handcuffed figure (Dru Jamieson). When Gillian warily befriends her more grounded neighbor Lisa (Tracy Vaden Moore), the shut-in finds a life-line to the outside world.