REBECCA GILMAN was born in the town Trussville, a suburb near Birmingham, Alabama.  She attended Middlebury College and was graduated from Birmingham-Southern College, later earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Her most widely known and performed works are Spinning Into Butter, produced here at The Stagecrafters in 2019, as well as Boy Gets Girl which made Time Magazine’s List of Best Plays and Musicals of the Decade.  Her play, The Glory of Living, a commission of the Goodman Theatre was awarded the Scott McPherson Award and was a finalist nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.
From 2006-2019, Gilman was Associate Professor of playwriting and screenwriting at Northwestern University and is now head of playwriting at Texas Tech University.
Boy Gets Girl received its first production at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2000.  It tells the story of what can happen when a blind date turns into a nightmare and deals with the issues of stalking, sexism, and the complicated nature of the idea of romantic pursuit.  Theresa Bedell, a writer for an upscale New York magazine, goes on a blind date with Tony, a likeable guy who works with computers.  After a second date, Theresa realizes that Tony is not a good match, and politely excuses herself.  That’s the point from which the acquaintance devolves to the scary. 

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:

In 2006 I lived this story, when I was a 33 year-old, independent professional living in Chicago. Not all of the extreme turns this story takes happened to me, but it could have easily developed that way. I definitely felt the way Theresa feels in this story.
I was lucky. But I was also young, and I spent the next ten years thinking that I must have done something to make that person feel this way about me. Hadn’t I been nice enough? Hadn't I said it was me and not him? Hadn't I been careful not to bruise his ego? Why was he so angry with me, when I had been so polite? Boy Gets Girl does an excellent job of pointing out that there are bigger issues involved here. It is not about what the woman did or didn't do; the question is, “What made the man think behaving like this was okay?”
In 2019 I read Rebecca Gilman’s insightful and haunting play and knew I had to direct it. Three years and a pandemic later, I am finally able to bring this important story to the stage and hope to change the way we as a society feel about an all-too-familiar scenario. The conversations I hope this drama will provoke can have the power to keep events like it from happening to others. No one has a right to claim someone else as theirs. Unions and relationships are forged, and earned, and built between two people who are on the same page in life and want the same things from each other. No one is owed something just because they want it. Unfortunately, that is not always a message that our society makes clear. So we, the storytellers have plays such as this one to make that point. I hope you enjoy watching our production as much as I enjoyed working on it with these incredible actors. And I hope you will leave the theater continuing the dialogue of change.