“A guy walks into a bar . . . , ” or so goes the familiar joke setup that works because guys are always walking into bars. Except in Rebecca Gilman’s Twilight Bowl, now playing through March 10 at the Goodman Theatre, the token guy never enters the scene. Over the course of the show’s 90-minute running time, not one man makes an appearance onstage—or even so much as issues a cue backstage.
Thompson says the space immediately felt safe. Director Erica Weiss made sure that everybody in the cast and crew felt heard, encouraged, and celebrated on a daily basis, even in moments of frustration.
Twilight Bowl begins with four young women clustered around the table of a bar within a small-town Wisconsin bowling alley. Gathered for what Gilman once wrote in an earlier draft of the play as a baby shower—”or something,” adds the playwright—the women are giving a send-off to their friend Jaycee (Heather Chrisler), who’s headed to prison in the morning for selling prescription meds. The other women in attendance represent different parts of Jaycee’s past. There’s her younger cousin, Sam (Becca Savoy), who’s nervous about leaving her hometown for Ohio State that fall; her oldest ride-or-die friend, Clarice (Hayley Burgess), who works at the Twilight Bowl but is growing weary of the low pay and the lack of long-term career prospects it offers; and then there’s Sharlene (Thompson), the God-fearing Christian who tries to see the best in each member of the group—especially Jaycee—despite their foul mouths.
“I think that when we think about rural life, [when] we think about working-class people, too often we think about what the male experience of that is, and we do not think about what life is like for women in small towns,” says Gilman, who herself grew up in a small town in Alabama. “I felt like there’s a whole lot of people out there who are working really hard and doing their best, but they have limited opportunities because capitalism is unfair to most people. And I wanted to look at what that was like, specifically what that is like for women in the United States. Because I think that, in addition to obstacles brought about by class disparity, there is also obviously gender politics in play for these women.” That sense of transition is woven into every scene due in large part to the set’s design.
“I think what we’re starting to realize is women have complex lives in and of themselves that oftentimes do not have particular attachments to men, and that those stories are also interesting,” says Thompson. “As you see in Twilight Bowl, on paper all of these women can seem kind of similar, but once you get into each of their stories, you feel for every single one of them, and you start to see just how different they each are. I’m on board for more weirdo women that you want to spend an hour and a half with, not just for a few minutes in the second act.” v
Through 3/10: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $15-$45.
