The Boy in the Bathroom: A Pleasant Surprise

The Boy in the Bathroom
9.20.07

I'm going to keep this one short, frankly, because I'm in dire need of some sleep. Such is the life of a college student. But, luckily for me, it's not hard to write a short review when that review is also a positive one.

I expected The Boy in the Bathroom to be another quirky, campy, loveably ridiculous show -- the title kind of makes it sound like one, anyway. But what I saw was just the opposite. I found myself rather enthralled by this one-act beauty: it is a show filled with a quiet, calm sincerity that we don't really see often enough in the current crop of new musical theater. It's an excellent example of less being more, in a way. It's free of that trite artificiality that often pervades musical theater; the material is strong enough that it doesn't need all of those bells and whistles to support itself. It's just good.

The show is about a young man with OCD who has not left his bathroom in a year: he one day chose to live there, where he could control the entire environment. His mother passes him food and other essentials underneath the door. When his mother breaks her hip, she hires a local girl named Julie to help her around the house. Julie and David form an unlikely bond, and eventually fall in love.

The obvious expectation is to assume that if David has OCD, he has clearly chosen to live in the bathroom because he can wash his hands as often as he pleases and live happily in obsessive cleanliness. But the show digs far deeper than that crude stereotype. It is about love and loss and difficult relationships -- how the complexities of mental illness can penetrate and destroy -- and what happens when we come across a love so pure yet so beautifully complicated that it pushes us farther than we thought we could go. David is far more complex than a young man with a need to compulsively clean as the title might indicate: he says that he's not sure whether he stays in the bathroom for fear that the world will contaminate him, or for fear that he might contaminate the world.

It's a boring thing to say, certainly, but it's true, so I suppose I have to subject readers to the boredom: the show is quite well-written across the boards. The score has no particular earworms, but it doesn't need them; it's a fluid, modern musical theater score with several moments that sound quite distinctly Sondheim-influenced -- and thankfully, a minimal amount of extranneous moments. The book is solid, and the characters are beautifully developed. It'd be easy to tell this story filled with caricatures -- but if audience reactions speak for anything, the audible gasps that weave throughout the theater should be proof enough that this story is heartwarming, heartbreaking, and one not difficult to get lost in. It's uncomfortable and unsettling. The ending doesn't tie up lose ends and leave everything packaged and resolved all nicely for us. It's thought-provoking and difficult, challenging, moving, and a great many of the other things I look for in a good musical. If it hasn't sold out yet, I strongly encourage you all to see it. I hope someone gives it a further production.