Movies do okay replicating novels, essays, poems, and even paintings, but for some reason, the medium has always had a hard time with theater. Cinema and theater are such similar artforms—just actors talking, for the most part—but movies are supposed to move, and the set-bound staging of plays often stymies filmmakers who try to open them up. Girl Play director Lee Friedlander struggles to adapt Robin Greenspan and Lacie Harmon's two-woman play Real Girls into something cinematic, primarily by bringing in veteran actors to dramatize her stars' monologues. Dom DeLuise appears as a director who casts Greenspan and Harmon in a play and brings them together as lovers for the first time, while Mink Stole plays Greenspan's high-strung (and highly clichéd) Jewish mother. Friedlander also lays in some silly digital-video tricks, making the movie look like a scratchy old black-and-white silent film when one of the characters compares a situation to, predictably, a scratchy old black-and-white silent film.
But animating the contents of a speech doesn't make the speech any less speech-y. Greenspan and Harmon worked the stand-up-comedy circuit before turning their lives into theater, and both Real Girls and Girl Play are essentially comic essays broken into parts and read aloud. Greenspan's half has more gags, like when she responds to a partner's insistence that sex have "no tongues, no noises," by saying, "Cool title for an indie film." But then she pauses interminably, waiting for a laugh. She's distractingly unnatural, though not as flat as Harmon, who looks a little like Téa Leoni and shares Leoni's mush-mouthed line deliveries. When she speaks, Girl Play sputters.
Much of Girl Play is bracingly honest, in that it's rare to see a lesbian love story that's so open about the way women meet and fall in love. But in the process of becoming characters, the writer-stars have diminished themselves. Aside from Greenspan's comment that she likes acting because it lets her experience another life without committing to it, the duo haven't invested their love story with a lot of personal nuance. They go broad, and Friedlander follows merrily along, pumping up the movie with gimmicks. When Friedlander illustrates an unexpected twist by inserting the sound of a needle being ripped off a record, it's becomes wincingly obvious that she's let the theater beat her senseless.