Outside the Lines
Written by Dana Lang of Off-Off Online
Published September 10, 2008

The Chalk Boy, written and directed by Joshua Conkel, is a sharply funny and energetic foray, sprawling forth from the high school caste system of present-day America, whose typical roles never completely contain his interesting and evolving characters. Centered around four young women, who at first glance could be cast into general archetypes like “The Slut,” “The Freak,” “The Prom Queen,” or “The Jock,” the play follows the developments surrounding the mysterious disappearance of their classmate (whose popularity only seems to grow with his absence), Jeffery Chalk.

We’re first introduced to the small Washington state community as voyeurs, watching the town being illustrated before us on chalkboards, then as participants when addressed as part of a school assembly, class, or pep rally (of sorts). This indoctrination works; it’s a familiar world to which everyone can relate, yet it still manages to be fresh, funny, and even surprising.

Here the usual teenage woes of school, dating, and parents are mostly backdrop. Life and limb may now be at risk, battle lines are drawn and redrawn, and the social rules are constantly changing. Even the non-satisfying pop soundtrack that punctuates their lives falls sorrowfully short for them—and Britney’s three-minute chirp doesn’t begin to cut it.

The girls’ underlying search for identity and meaning, whether through chugging cough syrup, spouting religious doctrines, exploring sexual identity, or performing Wiccan rituals, continues throughout, heightened by genuinely eerie bits and a certain sense of ongoing dread, if not exactly impending doom. Threats may loom, as does the character of the missing boy, yet their own self-explorations seem to be where the most is at stake. They are compelled to define themselves in relation to their missing classmate as well as to each other - not to mention trying to find out what has actually happened to him.

It’s no coincidence that the missing boy is named Chalk. Like the narrative blackboards before us, will they all of the characters just blow away or be erased at the end of the day? They struggle to answer the questions: Who matters? Who doesn’t? But maybe also: What remains? Or: What lasts? Beyond the characters’ longing for clear identity, what ultimately does carry meaning in their (and our) world?

It’s refreshing in a dark comedy to see characters who seem to be self-searching rather than the predictable self-loathing, as they find themselves unable to be contained within their own drawn circles (or pentagrams as the case may be), demonstrated by their changing allegiances and willingness to experiment beyond them. This optimism satisfies, somehow making it a “feel-good” darkened Black-as-Death world. If nothing else, it’s certainly more fun.

The actors’ performances are deft and dynamic, both as the four classmates and their lively sketches of other Clear Creek inhabitants. Penny’s inner and outer conflicts are portrayed with sullen perfection by Jennifer Harder, who makes Penny’s dissatisfaction with life enjoyably palpable. Mary Catherine Donnelly’s Lauren is single-mindedly earnest, and her full-on embodiment of Penny’s mother and others is skillful and engaging. Marguerite French, who plays the quirky Trisha, also brings to life multiple colorful characters with aplomb. Kate Huisentruit’s Breanna is honest and sweet, while the character seems almost too naïve for the world she inhabits.

The transitions between roles (and scenes) were directed and executed well, sometimes via simple onstage costume changes, which allowed for seamless transformations right before our eyes. The intimate space was also well utilized, with minimalist yet evocative props, corresponding lighting shifts, and double- or triple-duty set pieces, all of which served to bring the audience directly and believably into each scene.

Again, the world Conkel presents is familiar, although by no means predictable. Along these lines, the epilogue might have been slightly more open-ended and questioning rather than (almost too) neatly tied up. Sure, the stories are fairly true to expectation, but it might have been fun to engage the imagination of the audience even further with other possible endings for the characters, whether toward harsher cynicism, or hope for eventual liberation from the usual chalk outlines. In the meantime, though, it’s definitely worth hitching a ride.

The Chalk Boy
Written by A.J. Mell of Backstage Magazine
Published September 09, 2008

Fathoming the minds of teenage girls is no small task, but writer-director Joshua Conkel has risen to the challenge with this dark, compassionate satire. Filled with appalling but true-to-life observations and a keen ear for teenspeak, The Chalk Boy reveals what happens to a tightly knit group of high school girls in a small Washington town when a fellow student is murdered in the woods.

Essentially a four-character piece, with the leads sometimes doubling in supporting roles, The Chalk Boy could be accused of Breakfast Club-style reductionism in its use of familiar comic types. There's Trisha and Lauren (Marguerite French and Mary Catherine Donnelly), the mean-spirited goody-goodies of the Christian Athletes Club; Breanna (Kate Huisentruit), an overweight hangdog lesbian in combat fatigues; and Penny (Jennifer Harder), a bleary-looking "bad girl" who dabbles in the occult. (The all-female cast explains the absence of towel-snapping jocks and mouth-breathing geeks with pocket protectors).

Surprisingly enough, these four distinct characters transcend whatever pigeonhole one might be tempted to put them in. Conkel seems to understand that teens do a good job of stereotyping themselves, as high school is partially about deciding what tribe to belong to. His sympathies are clearly with outsiders Penny and Breanna, played with genuine sweetness by Harder and Huisentruit, and although Penny and Breanna's friendship forms the real heart of the play, French brings welcome nuance to her uptight-bitch role, and Donnelly does an amusing turn as Penny's spectacularly wrong-headed mother.

Plot is not this play's strong suit; despite the gruesomeness of the backstory, not much really happens. Although a little more dramatic momentum wouldn't hurt, it's enough that Conkel and the fine ensemble create characters worth caring about and evoke the humor and pathos of high school life without succumbing to camp.

Theater Review (NYC): The Chalk Boy by Joshua Conkel

Written by Ethan Stanislawski of Blogcritics Magazine
Published September 06, 2008

The Chalk Boy, perhaps more than any other play in recent memory, treats teenage girls as more than caricatures. Its characters are all human beings with human problems, whose flaws are just as tragic as those of characters from Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, or Ibsen. Their identity crises and their views on religion, destiny, and hope touch the same themes that have been touched by thinkers far removed from small town America. Two of the girls resort to witchcraft for the same reason people have been resorting to religion, drugs, art, or any other form of escape for as long as there’s been civilization: being alive is too painful without some sort of outlet.

Of course, all that’s in the undercurrent of what is in actuality a very funny play. The darker implications of the story are hidden in a black box of teen girl slang, with “kisses, bitches” and enough “bitches” “sluts” and “ho-bags” to convince you that you’re in high school all over again. Linguists argue that the popular bitchy middle- and high-school girls are the origins of new developments in American English, and while I’m too far removed from this period to say if playwright/director Joshua Conkel’s catalog of slang is completely accurate, he’s certainly developed a deftly-tuned ear for the meter and intensity of teen girl speak.

Marguerite French and Mary Catherine Donnelly narrate the play (they’re, what do you call it…omniscient!) as Trisha Sorensen and Lauren Radley, leaders of the Christian Varsity Youth, giving a presentation and hoping you’ll drink the orangeade they made. Both actors provide the comical framework and help establish a brilliant use of the limited Under St. Marks venue. They also take on any other role that is needed in a pinch, and while the fourth-wall breaking is somewhat too lackadaisical for my liking, it does provide Conkel with a number of tools for his storytelling. The play is somber, but almost always funny; its presentation is adolescent, but still intellectually challenging.
Another of The Chalk Boy’s greatest strengths is the unflinching honesty and bleakness it ascribes to small town America. Clear Creek, Washington is “one of those towns,” Conkel puts it - and as a native of one of those towns himself, his insights into the utter despair that grips these small towns is spot on. The play also highlights how blind most theater audiences—and New York audiences in particular—can often be to how the other half of America lives.

The play centers around the presumed abduction of a relatively popular boy named Jeffrey Chalk, who has gone missing and is presumed dead. This has been a problem with Clear Creek in the past and will continue to be. A curfew is instated, mothers and teachers become paranoid, and girls who are in love with Jeffrey start behaving even more nastily than they did before.

Chalk’s disappearance is the main motivation allowing the girls to feel comfortable asserting their own feelings about life, love, spirituality, and all that blah blah blah. Penny Lauder (Jennifer Harder) is perhaps the most complete character in the play; she experiences a false pregnancy from Jeff but refuses to believe it's false, with the same intensity and obvious futility with which she refuses to believe that Jeff is dead (futility is a recurring theme here). She sees herself as either unlucky, unredeemable, or just plain unlovable, destined to follow in the footsteps of her trailer-trash mother who also had a teen pregnancy. Her vaguely creepy, obviously confused friend Breanna (Kate Huisentruit), future Smith College material, tries to express love and affection for Penny that she knows can never truly be reciprocated until she gets out of this shit town.

The actors often struggle with the wide-ranging, constantly shifting emotional baggage of the play, both explicit and implicit. Conkel makes jokes about his characters’ limited vocabulary, yet they sometimes take on large themes in language too astute for a fifteen-year-old. But perfect consistency was a goal that Conkel was rightly willing to overlook with The Chalk Boy for the larger pursuit of taking the small-town American teen girl into existential territory, and his results are almost always grippingly poignant. You’ll more readily drink the comedic orangeade during the play, but you’ll leave it with a much deeper affliction.

The Chalk Boy
Written by Joseph Pisano of EDGE Magazine
Published September 08, 2008

Joshua Conkel’s The Chalk Boy now in production at UNDER St. Marks in the East Village, is billed as "a dark comedy about death, faith, paranoia, and teenage girls," a description that both underscores the play’s tone and its thematic ambitions. Set in a small American town named Clear Creek, the type of strip mall-infused locale where provincialism reigns supreme, "The Chalk Boy" unfolds as a series of flashbacks to the lives of four teenage girls and the tragedy that consumes their small community: the disappearance of Jeffrey Chalk, one of the most popular students from Clear Creek Community High School.

Two of the girls, Trisha Sorensen and Lauren Radley, members of their high school’s Christian Athletes Club and, therefore, of course, preternaturally spirited, serve as the play’s dubiously omniscient narrators, spewing catty observations about their town, Chalk’s apparent abduction and, especially, the lives of the play’s other two teenage girls, Penny Lauder, a sad soul with a tenuous emotional connection to Chalk, and Breanna Stark, a conflicted soul with a tenuous emotional connection to Penny.

"The Chalk Boy" benefits from a first-rate cast and crew that, given the play’s staging requirements and the theater’s space limitations, put forth a yeoman’s effort to ensure a successful production. In particular, Conkel owes Marguerite French (Trisha) and Mary Catherine Donnelly (Lauren) a debt of gratitude for an impressive display of nimble acting. In their roles as narrators, both women convincingly portray multiple characters, sometimes changing personas and costumes mid-scene. Although the play’s impact hinges mostly on their talents, Jennifer Harder as Penny, and Kate Huisentruit as Breanna, share several bittersweet scenes; their well-acted exchanges reveal the melancholy informing Conkel’s dark comedy. Harder is especially heartbreaking as the tormented Penny, a girl who finds hope only through her fantasies, which tragically seem even more pathetic than her real life. Though Breanna might be Penny’s salvation, the girl does not seem hardwired for happiness.

Like any good satirist, Conkel is adept at identifying social hypocrisy and ridiculing its practitioners. While the play’s setting -- a high school in small town America -- might seem like an easy target, and one too often exploited, the playwright offers enough thematic twists to save "The Chalk Boy" from accusations of unoriginality. Certainly, the contention that one’s high school years are usually a bleak period, even for those students who might appear outwardly to be enjoying adolescence, is not a startling observation, but Conkel sets his writing apart by delving into the nature of this bleakness.

Trisha, Lauren, Penny, and Breanna are each struggling towards adulthood, trying to figure out what to value and who to trust, all while hoping that there are essential meanings that will carry them through life. Trisha and Lauren have accepted those put forward by Christianity, while Penny and Breanna have become pentagram-drawing Wiccans. Both religions offer their adherents a sense of identity, but neither can explain war, poverty, natural disasters, or why someone would abduct a high school boy.

"The Chalk Boy" loses some momentum in its second act, largely because the author seems uncertain that the audience has understood his play’s more serious intentions; a few points are driven home too directly and redundantly. In this vein, Lauren brusquely becomes a mouthpiece for existential discontent, morphing from an Anita Bryant clone to a French café philosopher in a transition that rings false. Donnelly is up to the acting challenge, but, despite her admirable effort, the narrative groundwork for this radical change is missing.

These criticisms aside "The Chalk Boy" is a resonating achievement; Joshua Conkel merits praise both as playwright and director. His briskly paced and inventive staging serves the material well, compensating for a theater space that is undeniably charming, but also undeniably cramped, even by off-Broadway standards.

Initially, "The Chalk Boy" seems like an undemanding piece of theater; a witty but shallow tale of how the popular girls’ charmed lives compare to the daily indignities endured by the geeky Wiccans. As the play develops, however, it becomes clear that Conkel has managed instead to create a razor-sharp satire, a work whose caustic observations will linger long after the actors take their bows.

RetroVision Media Recommends Joshua Conkel’s The Chalk Boy
Written by Lee “The Cool Guy”
Published September 10, 2008

Every bit as grizzly as ghostly, Joshua Conkel’s The Chalk Boy delves deeply and darkly, yet surprisingly humorously into the lives of four teenaged girls coping with the sudden disappearance of their high school’s hunk. Playing at the Under St Marks Theatre on the lower eastside now through September 20th, this edgy tale almost qualifies as a psycho drama, were it not for its well timed comic relief.

With a backdrop of high school hotties, hormones and homophobia we get to see how a group of small town girls, school authorities and their families deal with the loss of a favorite son. Day after day passes as our mixed bag of femmes are pining away for a lost lover while getting disturbing reports of bloody fingers being found at the nearby creek, ominous Ouija board messages leaving little hope and creepy truckers planting the seeds of more of the town’s hidden horrors; past and present and future.

The story takes place in a real or imagined out of the way Clear Creek WA., aptly described as Orlando FL. without Disney World. This is a place of strip malls, fast and funky food joints and flat skylines. Mr. Conkel captures the blandness, the boredom and the bible thumping mindset blanketing the consciousness of small town youth desperately seeking a means to escape. While this easily makes for a great campfire chat in the boonies, a creepy story like this wouldn’t work in a city like New York, since many more would have to die/disappear for the story to get any ink in the local tabloids.

The casting of this gem leaves nothing to be desired as the four principals flawlessly melded their roles, seamlessly transitioning from one character to another with wit and professionalism. Taking their respective performances up to, but not over the top into the realm of the edgy avant-garde, this play turned out to be a perfect blend of talented writing, creative directing/staging that gives the audience far more than they could have expected.

The Chalk Boy
by Glen Weldon on July 17, 2008 - Washington City Paper

They say: “Beneath its boring facade a Northwest town hides a nasty secret, and the girls from local high school’s Christian Athletes Club are here to tell you about it. Murder, the occult, algebra - this is a deathly black comedy that punches as hard as your high school bully.”

Glen’s take: The above blurb — and the opening four minutes or so — would seem to augur a campy, over-the-top sendup of high school malaise, but Joshua Conkel’s The Chalk Boy has got more River’s Edge than Heathers in its dramaturgical DNA.And, much as I love me some “School’s-cancelled-today-because-Kurt-and-Ram-killed-themselves-in-a-repressed-homosexual-suicide-pact!” goodness, Conkel’s choice to ground his tale in a grubbier, less outsized reality makes for an admirably layered, thoughtful and slyly funny evening.

As you watch, you get the distinct sense that a different company could take the same script and have a sillier, campier time with it. Conkel’s play is built on the shifting alliances of four high school girls, and it wouldn’t take much to reduce them to types — Bitch, Witch, Jesusfreak, Dyke-in-Training — that would make for fish-in-a-barrel comic fodder. Certainly there are jokey elements (Wiccan ceremonies performed with cake servers and battery-operated candles) aplenty. And who knows: Wednesday night’s premiere was sparsely attended, and I suppose it’s possible that, given a larger crowd and bigger response, the actors might feel compelled to push their performances bigger. But I don’t think so. And I certainly hope not.

At the heart of The Chalk Boy is Jennifer Harder’s Penny, a prematurely weathered young woman who convinces herself she’s in love with a boy who’s gone missing. By imbuing Penny with a soft edge of world-weariness — she’s not so much alienated as she is disappointed — Harder helps keep the production rooted in the specfic; the other actors seem to key off her efforts. Kate Huisentruit is possessed of a killer deadpan, Mary Catherine Donnelly brings something small and true to each of the several roles she assumes, and Marguerite French is careful to supply her angry bitch Trisha with humanizing self-awareness.

Not every element emerges clearly; the sense of foreboding Conkel attempts to create — he wants you to feel the threat hanging over his characters, to sense the Something that waits for them in the darkness at the edge of town. It’s not there yet, but could be, with a bit of massaging. And I can’t shake the impression that Conkel doesn’t really stick the dismount — his ending is more of a stopping — but those are quibbles.

See it if: Um… you have a pulse? Look, I got nothing: Just see it, is all.

Skip it if: You were totally on your high school’s Spirit Week Committee, and Crazy Hat Day? Your idea.

The Chalk Boy - Reviewed by Bob Anthony of www.allartsreview4u.com, July 21, 2008

A solid script with fine comedic relief as two characters relate the death of a most attractive young man in small town America.  Mary Catherine Donnelly and Marguerite French were total delights as the story tellers and they played numerous town characters as well.  Jennifer Harder gave a wondrous performance as a petulant small town girl although she bordered on a "valley girl" approach throughout.  Kate Huisentruit played a suspicious "lesbian" character and she gave a wonderful monologue about a person who just hates everyone and therefore cannot love either man or woman. There is so much philosophical content in this play that makes it fascinating particularly since one heard all about kabala at Rorschach...now we hear in-depth about wickens. Playwright Joshua Conkel is a person whom one should look forward to producing greater drama in the future as he balances tragedy and comedy so adeptly.   Lots of laughs but also lots of perverse language and situations...but one must accept these features that describe the reality and ligua franca of high schoolers nowadays.  One can only hope for "prim and proper" to return to this group of teenagers socially.  This one is recommended highly.