WITH THIS RING,
I THEE KIDNAP

A deranged celebrity fantasy gets plenty of laughs
from three fearless performers, but Samantha Hurley’s
comedy runs out of ideas before it runs out of steam

In a basement bedroom in the year 2004, a CRT television blares clips from Tobey Maguire movies on a loop. The wall above the TV is plastered with posters of the actor. In the corner, a beaded curtain leads to a small bedroom where a fourteen-year-old girl is sitting on a bed enacting a complicated story using Barbie dolls. A support pole stands in the middle of the room, its base festooned with chains and a pair of handcuffs. An abrasive voice calls out to the girl, who runs upstairs, but not before grabbing an unusually large duffel bag.

When we next see the girl, she’s wearing a wedding dress. Her name is Shelby Hinkley, and she is the founder and presiding member of an unofficial Tobey Maguire Fan Club. With the aid of a book called Kidnapping for Dummies and with the unwitting help of one of her classmates, Shelby has kidnapped actor Tobey Maguire, who is handcuffed to the pole in her basement.

He is the love of her life.

She is going to marry him. Whether he likes it or not.

So begins Samantha Hurley’s I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire, the opening production of Refracted Theatre Company’s new season, now on stage at The Den Theatre in Wicker Park. Politely put, IGMYTM is a dark, dark comedy about parasocial relationships and celebrity culture. Impolitely put, it is fucking deranged.

Things quickly go south in Shelby’s basement. This Tobey Maguire is nothing like the soft-spoken heartthrob of her dreams. He’s rude and unpleasant. He smokes and curses. He treats her like crap. And he has a flap of skin where, in Shelby’s estimation, no flap of skin should ever be. The discovery of this skin is one of the best sight gags in the play and was the moment I decided that this production was nuts.

While Shelby starts to rationalize her way out of the realization that her matinee idol is an asshole, Tobey starts to slowly lose it. He starts huffing fumes from a can of spray paint and having conversations with the poster versions of himself. These posters are played by Lucy Stoole, the drag persona of Ty Huey. Lucy is large, sassy, and Black, with eyelashes for miles. She is also impossibly fabulous. In other words, perfectly suited to play the doppelgänger of a skinny, pasty white man. Stoole also plays a real estate agent, assorted paparazzi, and provides the raspy voice of Shelby’s overbearing mother.

The conceit of a neglected, abused, and bullied child developing obsessive behavior as a coping mechanism is not a new one. In fact, thematically there’s nothing in IGMYTM that hasn’t been done before. It’s only the level of absurdity that separates this show from others of its ilk.

It also helps that all three actors are fully committed to the insanity of the script. Alex O’Shea gives a fearless performance as Shelby, creating a character that would be exhausting if she weren’t so funny, and Lucy Stoole effortlessly steals the scene every time she appears, but the sharpest performance comes from Jasper Johnson, who charmed his way through a near-wordless part as the male concubine in A Red Orchid’s Veal last season. Johnson chooses not to do an impersonation of Maguire—for which I’m eternally grateful—focusing instead on channeling the privilege and egotism of the spoilt celebrity. It’s a cool, underplayed performance, not unlike Maguire’s stock-in-trade, and is crucial to the play, balancing out, as it does, O’Shea’s manic energy. He’s also a dab hand at improvisation, which is on display in a bravura set piece where, in the course of a rant about the isolation and misery that fame brings, he breaks the fourth wall and interacts with the audience.

Again, nothing particularly new. But that audience participation bit highlights one of the two big problems with IGMYTM: there’s not much method to this madness. Once the concept has been established, Hurley doesn’t quite know where to go. Director Tyler Struble compensates by ratcheting up the pace, and it all culminates in the second big problem: a chaotic climax that makes no sense even within the context of the play. It almost works because the actors are so good—Ms. Stoole is particularly invaluable in this portion—but giving it the slightest amount of thought reveals a playwright who has run out of ideas and a play that doesn’t know how to end.

It’s still very funny, but there’s little else. There’s only so much that actors can do.

photos by Joe Mazza/Brave Lux

I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire
Refracted Theatre Company
Bookspan Theatre at The Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago
Thu–Sat at 7:30; Sun at 3
100 minutes, no intermission
ends on October 31, 2026
for tickets ($40, before fees), visit Refracted

for more shows, visit Theater in Chicago

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