Girlfriends review: Sara Malinowski on the road

This one-woman show is as captivating as it is simple, relying solely on Sara Malinowski’s ability to engage with the audience, exploit the environment around her, and embody all the characters of this coming-of-age indie epic. It’s intended as a love story, but it is just as much a story about friendship and the different ways young women embody their insecurities. A meeting between two girls, Scout and Oliska, leads to a fateful cross-country journey from the East Coast all the way to California.

Each small act of this cabaret-play reveals just a little bit more about these girls. Scout, feeling like a ghost, heartbroken by the boy she has been dating for years, wants to find herself. She is especially blind to all the things that make her unique and ‘whole’: an astonishing singing voice (which at some point pays for the gas that makes the trip happen in the first place), her penchant for drama, and her resilience. When she feels unseen, she is mostly talking about being unseen by men.

Oliska is just the opposite: overconfident on the surface, just too cool sometimes, too brash and dry-witted, all while hiding her own insecurities. Deep down, she does not think much of herself. Her mother has brought her up to think of her body and, consequently, her relationship with men, as transactional. While Scout feels like she is easily eclipsed by her new friend, Oliska carries her own darkness in secret.

Malinowski’s show is snappy and hilarious. It easily won the audience laughs, but it is also another necessary story of how women relate to each other, and the anxiety that (mostly) comes from all the different ways society tells them they are wrong. She does it through a trope familiar to millennials: the trip to find yourself.

A narrative that has been part of our adolescence in so many forms, with its soundtrack, picaresque episodes, and life revelations prompted by the natural beauty that surrounds us, and that make everything else seem so small. Girlfriends represents this trip extremely well, turning adventure into a journey of self-discovery and self-love for both girls.

Girlfriends is at Jade Studio at Greenside at George Street, 7th till 29th August (except 16th and 23rd)

Photo credit: Eran Zelixon