One Girl Chooses Between Two Guys in New Play 'Mine' at the Elephant

Bekah Brunstetter's slight but largely charming play "Mine" about a thirtysomething romantic triangle is getting a good production right now at the Elephant Stages Performance Lab in Hollywood.

All three characters are living in New York at the start of the play. Annie (played by Kieren van den Blink) calls herself a poet when she isn't working as a barista alongside her scruffy pal Sam (Sam Daly), an acoustic guitar-playing singer/songwriter, with whom she's developed a kind of mutual friend-crush. Her square but successful yuppie boyfriend Doug (Adam Harrington) has the job offer of a lifetime in Philadelphia but won't take it unless she agrees to move there with him. Annie is taken aback by Doug's insistence, but even though she's not that into him, she also can't afford to live without him.

Meanwhile, as soon as Annie finally makes it to one of Sam's gigs, just before she leaves town, he gets discovered by a Vice music writer, who introduces him to record label and manager types, and just like that he has a career and a national tour. Of course the letters he writes and the demo CDs he sends to Annie, now bored as hell with nothing to do all day on Rittenhouse Square, exacerbate her restless nostalgia for the hipster life, and the hipster, she left behind.

Director Dep Kirkland gets a lot out of this somewhat shopworn plot material, expertly intermingling the three characters in each others' lives and minds. Van den Blink does a good job navigating Annie's transitions between East Village Holly Golightly and desperate kept woman, while Harrington avoids settling into the role of a laughable romantic sucker, infusing Doug with a bold pathos and integrity that win us over well before Annie makes up her mind.

"Mine" plays Thursday-Sunday evenings (3 p.m. show only on Oscar Sunday, Feb. 26) through March 10. Advance tickets $22.50, half price on Sundays.