Speaking the Unbearable

Photographing the rehearsal of Girls & Boys this week was an experience that stayed with me long after I packed away my camera. Dennis Kelly’s one-woman play is known for its brutal emotional landscape, but I did not know the play before. Witnessing Anne Marie Sheridan inhabit this role at such close range was something else entirely. In the intimacy of the rehearsal room, the boundary between observer and character dissolved; you don’t just watch her—you feel pulled into her world, step by painful step. It’s a performance that demands emotional proximity, and before you realise it, you’re breathing with her, hurting with her, and holding your breath in the moments she can barely speak.

There is an extraordinary intimacy in watching a performer alone onstage, constructing an entire world from memory, gesture, humour, and pain. The small size of the Atelier Theater and the minimalist stage set are perfect for this play. Anne Marie delivers this with a rawness that is disarming. Several times during the rehearsal I found myself blinking back tears, not because anything is shown overtly, but because everything is felt. Her performance moves with the precision of someone tracing the fault lines of a life—sometimes with wit and charm, other times with a tension so fragile it seems one breath might shatter it.

The story begins lightly: an unexpected airport encounter, a whirlwind romance, the hopeful architecture of a shared life—careers, children, the messy joys of a growing family. But slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the cracks begin to appear. What starts as a portrait of modern love gradually shifts into something darker, more uncomfortable, more painfully recognisable. Kelly’s writing is unflinching in the way it examines power, resentment, and the subtle fractures that can pull a marriage apart.

The rehearsal revealed the sheer emotional range demanded of the performer. Anne Marie navigates sharp humour, quiet tenderness, rising dread, and devastating honesty with an immediacy that makes it impossible to look away. Her delivery feels less like acting and more like a confession—private, urgent, and deeply human.

This play is intense, beautifully crafted, and profoundly challenging. For those ready to sit with a story that mixes hilarity with horror, love with loss, and social commentary with deeply personal tragedy, this production will leave a mark.

Girls & Boys premieres tonight at Atelier Theater in Vienna, marking the first time Kelly’s acclaimed monologue is performed here in English.

More Info

Performed by: Anne Marie Sheridan
Directed by: Owen Lindsay
Audio-Visual Design: Oleg Prodeus
Presented by special agreement with Cassarotto & Ramsay & Associates.

Content guidance: Themes of violence, misogyny, and child death.

All rehearsal photos on Viennacultgram.com © are my own.

More information and tickets

Where:
Ateliertheater
Burggasse 71
1070 Wien