The Fitting Room

The Fitting Room
At Havana Theatre until May 18, 2019
Tickets from $15 at showpass.com

Posted May 15, 2019

We probably all wonder what happens to a kid who accidentally kills a friend or sibling with his dad’s shotgun. How does living with that stigma shape the adult he or she will become?

First-time playwright Ellery Lamm takes it in a slightly different direction in The Fitting Room: thirteen-year-old Henry (Ciaran Volke) has dared his best friend Noah to do something dangerous and Noah dies as a consequence. Everyone at school knows about it; everyone is talking (“A creep, like that guy who killed his best friend last week”) and it’s all over social media. His mother Amy (Kelly Vanderswan) is frantic with worry partly because Henry does not seem particularly remorseful. But the dangerous dare – part of a game Noah and Henry played – didn’t come out of nowhere; there was some provocation.

Playwright Lamm has really written two plays that sometimes work together, sometimes not. The parallel narrative involves Cleo (Charlotte Thompson), her bestie Sophie (Una Rekić) and Noah’s older sister Hanna (Amber Landry), an outspoken, rebellious lesbian who changed schools, “because that school was a waste of my brain.” The whole midsection of The Fitting Room revolves around Cleo, Sophie and Hanna; Henry’s story is eclipsed and only resurfaces later.

But Lamm has written what feels like a very real slice of early teenaged life with all its insecurities, carelessness and off-the-rails mood swings. One minute Cleo and Sophie are goofing it up to Meghan Trainor’s Me Too, the next minute Sophie is sulking and bullying Cleo.

Almost all of the 75-minute play is set inside or just outside a fitting room where Henry’s mother tries to outfit him with appropriate clothes for Noah’s funeral and where Sophie shops for something sexy to wear for a date with a guy so dumb, says Cleo, that he thinks Catcher In the Rye is about baseball. In a neat little twist, both Henry’s mother and soon-to-be-out Cleo, argue over the same piece of clothing.

Under Anna Marie Anderson’s direction for Collectivus Theatre, The Fitting Room is a little uneven. It’s difficult for adult actors to portray kids but Volke is not so far out of his own his teenaged years that he manages fairly well: the posturing, the outbursts, the self-recrimination. Rekić’ s Sophie is so like some girls overheard in malls – the bitchiness and self-absorption – that the dialogue feels like verbatim theatre. Thompson, as solidly grounded Cleo, is engaging, likeable and believable while Vanderswan, despite the fact that as Henry’s mother she’s distraught, could rein in the high anxiety a notch. Most interesting character on the stage Is Hanna and Landry is like a little firebrand, her hair wild and curly, her Docs battered and ‘made for walkin’ and attitude pouring out of her.

The Fitting Room was, early in its development, workshopped under the guidance of playwright and teacher Joan MacLeod (Shape of a Girl and others). Like that play, The Fitting Room would do really well in schools. “No one is good when they’re thirteen”, says Hanna, who goes on to say, “Boys never think”. A generalization for sure but a dramatized reminder about the consequences of the choices we make can never be stated enough.

Short run; find a teenager and see it together.