Review: Bella Poynton Conjures Ghosts of Desire in “The Girl in the Washroom”
- Anthony Chase
- 7 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Anthony Chase
There’s a touch of alchemy at work in The Girl in the Washroom, the latest play from Bella Poynton, whose fascination with science fiction, artificial intelligence, and the paranormal has marked her as one of Buffalo’s most imaginative dramatists. Working in collaboration with Buffalo United Artists (BUA), long a vanguard for LGBTQ+ storytelling, and First Look Buffalo, which specializes in new work, Poynton opens a door into the unseen: not only the ghosts of the dead, but the emotional phantoms that shadow intimacy, identity, and memory.
Act One is set in a New York City hotel room during the winter of 1965, immediately after a violent encounter in a nearby alleyway. A bruised, intoxicated socialite named Daisy Nash and a guarded, androgynous stranger named Stanley have taken refuge there, each carrying her own private wounds.
What begins as an act of kindness, Stanley helping Daisy to safety, gradually transforms into a night of layered revelation. Daisy, jittery and half‑mystical, begins describing visions or “pictures” from both past and future. She insists she hears a woman crying behind the bathroom door, “the girl in the washroom,” while Stanley, skeptical but gentle, humors her anxieties. Over the course of their dialogue, the two women test the limits of gender, class, and vulnerability.
As they drink, joke, and circle each other emotionally, their dynamic shifts from wary strangers to something charged and intimate. Stanley confides that she is a recovering alcoholic; Daisy alternates between flirtation and self‑mockery, revealing that she’s the daughter of a powerful industrialist engaged to a man she despises. Beneath the flirtation runs mounting tension: Daisy’s psychic “pictures” grow sharper, and Stanley’s past proves darker than it first appeared.
The women’s conversation, by turns flirtation and confession, feels charged with immediacy, achieving what Tennessee Williams called “the delicate balance between realism and poetry.” As Daisy confides, “Pictures, of the past, or the future. Sometimes I can’t tell which. It’s like remembering things you never knew to begin with.” That reflection could stand as a statement of Poynton’s artistic method, her dialogue inhabits both psychological realism and metaphysical imagination, merging the known world with the flicker of what can’t quite be explained.
By the end of Act One, both women have exposed too much, of body, of history, of self. The act closes on an ambiguous tableau of connection and dread: two women trapped between desire and fear, while behind the closed bathroom door, something, or someone, seems to stir.
The play will return to this hotel room decades later, but first Poynton builds a taut, intimate chamber drama in which two strangers form a bond as fragile as it is fated. The words shimmer with the density of lived experience, at once funny, confiding, and alive to contradiction.
Without venturing into spoiler territory, it can be said that the second half of the play, which takes place in the same hotel room, sixty years later, deepens the mystery in unexpected ways, as we are transported to the present day. Daphne and Sage, self‑styled paranormal investigators who host a podcast on supernatural encounters, enter the same hotel room, now a minor urban legend known for “the girl in the washroom.”
They come armed with microphones and cameras, ready to snag ghostly content for their next episode. But their investigation quickly becomes personal: what begins as performative curiosity transforms into a kind of séance of memory and identity. Poynton uses their banter and friction as a witty exploration of generational difference, between the tentative self‑definition of Millennials and the more declarative confidence of Gen Z. Daphne’s deliberate resistance to labeling collides with Sage’s sharp conviction, and through them, Poynton dramatizes how questions of queerness, intimacy, and authenticity keep evolving.
Poynton’s structure is quietly audacious, and her temporal doubling, not unlike what Caryl Churchill achieves in Cloud Nine or what Sam Shepard finds in the American landscape, becomes a meditation on how queer lives are both haunted and sustained by those who came before. The supernatural remains, but takes on the quality of metaphor: what we inherit, and what refuses to leave. “I don’t want to disappear,” Daphne cries, “like a ghost desperate to make itself known.” In that moment, the haunting becomes human; the spectral transforms into moral force.
That capaciousness of spirit, the refusal to let love or memory go quietly, marks Poynton’s writing throughout. The craft is meticulous. Her dialogue sounds lived-in, not literary, and yet accrues symbolic charge as the narrative advances. Beneath the naturalism, myth percolates.
Poynton is a playwright of striking intelligence and expanding national reputation. Her recent work The Mighty Maisie, which premiered at A.R.T. in Buffalo, offered a sly extraterrestrial encounter refracted through human frailty. The Girl in the Washroom continues that trajectory, confirming her as a writer who wields genre not as gimmick but as lens, an elegant means of dramatizing the strangeness of being alive, and of being seen.
She extends the lineage of Sam Shepard, reworking his American archetypes -- the drifter, the haunted dreamer, the captive heart -- into a queer, feminist key. Her America is not the frontier of fathers and sons but the psychic borderland of women haunted by inheritance and desire. She joins contemporary dramatists like Annie Baker and Jordan Harrison in treating the uncanny as a tool for intimacy rather than distance, a poetic entryway to what language alone can’t contain.
The BUA / First Look Buffalo production, meanwhile, features an ensemble whose courage and nuance match the sophistication of the writing. Stephanie Warnick, playing both Daisy and her modern counterpart Daphne, gives a luminous performance, utterly natural, quietly transfixing. With movie-star poise and emotional transparency, she anchors the production in something that feels heartbreakingly real. Warnick’s performance glides between wit and ache, as if she’s simultaneously haunted and haunting. Her dual embodiment underscores the play’s inquiry into continuity, how one woman’s longing becomes another’s echo.
Paige Cummings, who has been blazing across Buffalo stages this year – first as the German stewardess is Boeing Boeing at the Kenan Center, and then, impressively taking over the role of the wise but socially inappropriate girlfriend in Alleyway’s fabulous production of The Cottage -- is once again extraordinary, this time as Stanley and Sage, two distinct women connected by a fragile thread of defiance. Whether embodying the wary toughness of the 1960s outcast or the restless confidence of a contemporary queer woman, Cummings fills the stage with magnetic presence and instinct. Her control of tone suggests an intuitive grasp of Poynton’s layered rhythms, from staccato wit to dreamlike suspension. She’s quickly becoming one of the most exciting performers in the region.
Bob Rusch, doubling as the two male characters, gives perhaps his finest Buffalo performance to date, sharp, grounded, and quietly menacing when needed, cheerfully clueless when appropriate. His work provides a counterbalance to the female intensity surrounding him, underscoring how men in this world occupy both shadow and structure: present yet peripheral, human but spectral.
Under Mike Doben’s direction, the production feels both intimate and cinematic, alive to delicate shifts of time and tone.
The transitions between eras are managed with admirable fluidity; one sometimes senses the ghost of light itself passing through rooms. The atmosphere, half motel realism, half psychic séance, suggests a filmmaker’s eye for framing emotion. BUA has long created stages where emergent voices find gravity and grace, and Poynton’s latest work rewards that faith magnificently.
Poynton’s central image, the hotel room as both enclosure and time capsule, becomes a metaphor for identity itself: a space we return to, redecorate, and haunt. It is at once sanctuary and trap, familiar yet unstable, a literal and psychic chamber where the characters confront what refuses to be exorcised. Set designer Sarah Waechter captures this duality with simplicity and precision, giving the stage a lived‑in realism that conceals lurking mystery. The period details and a sense of architectural fatigue, anchor the first act in 1965’s hushed glamour, while the later transition to the present emerges with deceptive ease, as if the tired room itself were remembering. The set also has some tricks up its sleeves, deepening the sense that this is not just a location but a sentient witness, haunted by its past occupants and by the audience’s imagination.
Costume designer Kay Johnson grounds the production in character truth as much as historical accuracy. Paige Cummings’s period‑appropriate, androgynous attire, flashes of muted defiance, carries the quiet boldness of 1960s queer invisibility, while Stephanie Warnick’s “lipstick‑lesbian chic,” all pearls and perfect tailoring, gleams with irony. Fashion here becomes another form of disguise and revelation. In the transition to Act Two, the clothes shift forward without losing their conversation with the past, suggesting how desire itself evolves yet endures.
The visual cohesion extends through sound and light, which together summon a subtle world of dread and longing. Sound designer Sage Becker gives the production its eerie pulse, layering ghostly murmurs and dissonant hums that seem to breathe with the characters.
Lighting designer David Guagliano, working within the constraints of the fixed light plot at Canterbury Woods Performing Arts Center, nonetheless achieves a striking film‑noir chiaroscuro.
A greater sense of the time period would have been helpful in Act One, and Act Two might benefit from tightening its expansive if glorious analytical passages. Yet even those moments of excess testify to the breadth of Poynton’s imagination; hers is not a minimalist’s theater but one of generosity and reach. The Girl in the Washroom is a ghost story with a pulse, funny, unsettling, deeply humane. It’s a play of specters and conscience that reminds us how the past refuses to stay buried, a haunting new work that confirms Bella Poynton as one of Buffalo’s most original theatrical voices. By peering through a keyhole between worlds, she reminds us that desire, like the past, has no intention of staying quiet.
Performance Information
No one under 18 admitted
Showtimes
Friday, October 24 – 7:30 PM
Saturday, October 25 – 5:00 PM
Thursday, October 30 – 7:30 PM
Friday, October 31 – 7:30 PM
Saturday, November 1 – 5:00 PM
Sunday, November 2 – 2:00 PM
Friday, November 7 – 7:30 PM
Saturday, November 8 – 5:00 PM
Tickets
General Admission – $30
Seniors/Students – $20
Venue
Canterbury Woods Performing Arts Center
705 Renaissance Drive, Williamsville, New York 14221