‘Tobey Maguire’ comedy gets tangled in its own web

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on October 2, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

Today’s Toppman on the Arts is sponsored by the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. Great Scott! Watch Marty and Doc race against time while the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra performs the score live at Back to the Future in Concert.

by Lawrence Toppman

The British have a dramatic genre dubbed “kitchen sink,” because it depicts ordinary lives with detailed reality. I’d call “I’m Gonna Marry You Tobey Maguire” an “everything but the kitchen sink” comedy, because playwright Samantha Hurley goes as far in the other direction as she can.

She changes emotional lanes constantly, veering from absurdist humor to pathos to nutty violence with the reckless speed of a driver on the Autobahn. Sometimes characters stay within her crazy quilt of a narrative; sometimes they break the fourth wall and address the audience. The play takes place in one room of a South Dakota home, located in a town whose name is too obscene to print—or does it take place in the mind of the 14-year-old fantasist at its center?

Even the title has no grounding in reality: To Shelby Hinkley, “marrying” the “Spider-Man” star means putting on a wedding dress over her jeans and declaring them hitched while he’s chained to a pole in her basement. (Was I the only one at Warehouse PAC who thought her last name, a soundalike for the guy who shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, was in bad taste?)

Sometimes Hurley seems to be mocking pampered performers, as in Maguire’s self-pitying soliloquy about fame. Sometimes she appears to be making fun of obsessed fans. Sometimes she’s going after people who define themselves only by online popularity. Sometimes, perhaps, she’s trying to reveal the unhealthy nature of celebrity culture, the way Martin Scorsese did in the more focused “The King of Comedy” and Stephen King did in the creepier “Misery.”

Despite the title character’s musings as to whether he really is the Tobey plastered around Shelby’s basement on posters and in photos — he claims his head was superimposed on Jake Gyllenhaal’s body — we realize Shelby successfully kidnapped the actor on the eve of shooting “Spider-Man 2.” (Hurley doesn’t try very hard to make sense of this abduction.)

All kidnappers are heartless, mentally unstable or both. Shelby’s not heartless, so we know she has mental problems. But unlike Scorsese’s and King’s protagonists, we’re meant to find her funny much of the time. I couldn’t — mental illness doesn’t make me laugh — but that’s not the fault of Caroline Magee, who captures the mood swings and self-doubt of a ninth-grader on the brink of young womanhood.

Adam Peal does equally well, whether wearing the “full-body condom” suit as Spider-Man or trying to bluster his way out of captivity as the street-clothed Maguire. Hurley depicts Maguire, who would have been 29 at the time of the setting, as a cocaine-snorting, cigarette-smoking, foul-mouthed alcoholic, and Peal embraces that don’t-give-a-damn attitude.

They handle all the dialogue, except for half-intelligible shouts through a closed door by Shelby’s unseen mother, until a third character finally shows up: real estate agent Brenda Dee Cankles, played with terrific zest by Valerie Thames. On the plus side, she’s a funny exaggeration of American go-getterism. On the minus side, she says the word “cornhole” over and over for cheap laughs, and her vigorous arrival doesn’t alter the course of the play: Something startling takes place, but it ends up not really meaning anything.

This was Hurley’s first play, and she seems to be searching for both a tone of voice and a narrative structure that works for absurdist comedy. Perhaps she found it later in “Lincoln Lincoln Lincoln Lincoln,” about a love triangle at the annual Abraham Lincoln Impersonators Weekend, or “(Re)Vulva,” in which a woman wakes up to find an old man — the physical embodiment of her vagina — pointing a pistol at her and promising to kill her if she doesn’t have sex within a week. I doubt I will ever know.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.