Boys & Girls

STAKE AND SHAKE Stojak, from left, Buller and Golden close the deal.

Photo: Marisa Wegrzyn

This weekend, movie theaters will be flooded with the minions of Carrie Bradshaw craving the real thing. Since Carrie lapsed into syndication, fizzy, comfort-food gender clichés have become the domain of inferior imitators. One of the many refreshing qualities of Theatre Seven’s double bill of MacIvor’s one-act “Never Swim Alone” (about how awful men can be) and MacLeod’s “The Shallow End” (about how awful girls can be) is that it features all the Type-A personalities found in such down-market Mars-Venus variations. And yet with sharp focus and keen, spare theatrics, it sidesteps rom-com for the more dangerous water of gender intramurals.

In MacIvor’s play, directed with head-turning precision by Bordelon, two suit-wearing players recount directly to the audience their friendship since childhood. But the more anecdotes these two best buddies peel off, the more the cold-dead competition and masculine insecurities at their cores are revealed. Written in slick, syncopated, macho cadences—it’s somewhere between David Mamet and Professor Harold Hill—“Swim” is delivered by Golden and Stojak with two qualities rare in actors this young: gravitas and menace.

Given the sleek violence of MacIvor’s play, pairing it with MacLeod’s short, frightening vignette about the summer poolside backbiting of pubescent girls—and staging it with real teens, no less—seems an act of LaButian perversion. But while the cast of young ladies I saw (there are two that alternate) didn’t match Golden and Stojak in technique, they were still excellent and brought an emotional nakedness that can’t be faked.