TRENTON, Mich. – If there’s a blind date in your immediate future you may want to skip seeing Boy Gets Girl. It’s a play not so much about a first date gone bad—the date actually goes…okay – but about the days and weeks that follow. As the movie ads used to say: Be afraid, be very afraid.

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For those who aren’t facing any blind dates, Topher Alan Payne’s Open Book Theatre production of Rebecca Gilman’s 2000 drama has a great deal to offer, most notably the incomparable and complete performance by Krista Schafer Ewbank as Theresa, a woman beset by a stalker, Tony, the man she rejects after their second date.

One part a disquisition on gender politics, one part “Law & Order: SVU,” Gilman’s play appeals to the intellect and to that part of us that can’t wait to see what happens next.

The playwright sacrifices a bit of the latter in service to the former, but compensates for it by having written a role that, with the right actress, lets a woman devolve before our eyes from brisk and confident to frightened and enraged over two-and-a-half hours. It’s a task that Ewbank accomplishes subtly and less so, in voice, face and body language, beginning as her fingertips tap the restaurant table and her hands rub her thighs in discomfort.

Tony, played by David Moan, starts off ingratiating and puppy-like. To Moan’s credit, there’s something a little off about Tony, but nothing you can point a finger at.

Theresa is a writer at a New York magazine that covers culture and politics. As Tony’s unwanted attention goes from mildly annoying to something worse, Theresa find support from her editor, Howard (Dennis Kleinsmith), and fellow writer Mercer (Jeff Fritz), not so much from secretary Harriet (Alexis Barrera), and help from the police detective (Jan Cartwright) assigned to her case.

In a tasty tangent to the main action, Theresa is sent to interview an aging director of raunchy movies, Les Kennkat (Dan Jaroslaw), an unrepentant sexist, but somehow likable nonetheless. At least he’s honest about it, not at all threatening, and Jaroslaw plays him with a twinkling eye.

These other characters, all of them portrayed well, flesh out Theresa’s world and provide an excuse for Gilman to write as dialogue what would be, in newspaper lingo, a Sunday think piece about culture and gender. One point she makes is that unwanted romantic pursuit pays off in movies and TV fiction, but it’s creepy, or worse, in real life.

Although such conversations provide context, by the middle of Act 2 one longs to get back to the suspense.

It doesn’t help that there are so many scene changes, each taking up time. The changes—the magazine office, Theresa’s apartment and a handful of other interiors—permit all the significant action to take place downstage center, but the design team could have left the two main settings, the office and apartment, on the stage and used lighting to communicate the switch in locale. Trust your space.

True, the scene changes are accompanied by recorded songs about love (or something like it), from Dean Martin to Smokey Robinson to Nine Inch Nails—and, at intermission, Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” never sounded more sinister—but we get it.

Anyway, what’s between the scene changes is what resonates. And it does. Pleasant dreams.

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