Girl Boy Girl Boy Girl is a new 30-minute play written by Bear Kosik and directed by Erika Lupo that follows a group of five adults playing “the game”, a mashup of Duck Duck Goose and Musical chairs where the last two or three players remaining go to a back room to have sex, leaving the remaining players to discuss intimacy.

The play’s description tells us to “leave our inhibitions at home” but in reality, nothing particularly scandalous took place and the conversations about intimacy felt lacking and did not seem to move the characters forward. In a 30-minute play everything has to be incredibly efficient. Character journeys have to happen over a much shorter amount of time and the writer only has a certain amount of time to both put forth the ideas they want to discuss and move a plot forward. The last thing you want is an audience saying at the end “Oh. It’s over already?” Which is exactly where I found myself.

The main story centers around three of the five players, Bill (Sammy Rivas), Mike (Dan Bellusci), and Nikki (Emma Waterhouse) being the last three remaining in the game. They disappear to the other room to have sex and then Nikki suddenly returns, revealing that Bill and Mike were continuing without her. Later on, Bill, having not realized that he was attracted to men, is reeling from that discovery. Mike, much more comfortable in his sexuality, talks him through it. All the while in between, the remaining two adults (and eventually Nikki as well) talk in length about “the game.” It’s clear very early on that “the game” is a metaphor for sex.

Half of the short runtime of the piece is filled with characters just sitting around talking about “the game” and discussing the differences in “the game” between men and women but failing to say anything new and sometimes getting so wrapped up in the metaphor that it’s confusing. Most of the scenes feature the actors just sitting in chairs, outside of one moment where the two men are walking in a circle around the two women for the entire conversation, a move which left me incredibly dizzy and unsure what was happening.

The performances by the five actors (Rivas, Bellusci, Waterhouse, and Zoe Zifer and Jessica Wang who rounded out the cast) were all very well done. I was very interested to learn more about the Bill, Mike and Nikki pairing and could see a longer piece tackling Bills budding insecurities being really compelling and fun (that’s what I thought was happening). Though, I failed to see what role the other two characters, Adele (Zifer) and Charmaine (Wang) played in the story.

Ultimately, Girl Boy Girl Boy Girl feels like the start of a play rather than a whole piece. It has interesting characters, great performances, and a compelling premise but cuts itself off before any of the characters can move the story forward. If these characters are ever to return in a full length that concerns itself less with asserting its metaphor and more with fulfilling arcs, I think it could be something really interesting. But as a 30 minute piece, I feel like I’m the one left out of the game.