Home > Theater Reviews > Archives > 2007 > October > 04
Thursday, October 4, 2007
‘Rabbit Hole’ @ Theatre in the Square
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. GRADE: B +
The 4-year-old boy is everywhere.
He’s in the clothes his mother gently folds and places into a laundry basket. In the fingerprints she wants to erase from the walls of the family’s suburban New York City home. In the video his father watches late at night when he thinks no one can see him.
Such vestiges of grief are smeared all over David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” which describes a family so shattered by a young boy’s accidental death that it is on the verge of disintegrating. A playwright known for exploiting the eccentricities and permutations of parent-child relationships (“Kimberly Akimbo”), Lindsay-Abaire here positions his microscopic lens on a normal-looking specimen of the American middle class — revealing its fragile emotional core in wrenching detail.
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama, “Rabbit Hole” is getting a crisply designed, smartly acted production at Marietta’s Theatre in the Square. Directed by Susan Reid and starring Atlanta newcomer Antonia Fairchild as Becca (the role that won actress Cynthia Nixon a Tony Award), “Rabbit Hole” finds considerable strength and integrity in its understatement.
As Becca’s borderline-trashy sister Izzy (the excellent Kate Donadio) reveals her pregnancy and her mother Nat (Marianne Fraulo in top form) prattles on about the tragedies of Rose Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, Lindsay-Abaire slowly plants clues about what’s troubling Becca. She makes fabulous desserts, but she is as shaky inside as her creme carmel. Angry, alienated and sexually tense, she refuses to be comforted — or to share her grief.
Becca shuns the romantic advancements of her husband (Charles Horton) and resents her mother for mentioning the premature death of Becca’s brother. Her little boy, Danny, she says, was “a 4-year-old who chased his dog into the street.” Her brother, Arthur, on the other hand, was a “30-year-old heroin addict who hung himself.” Cruel and hypocritical, she turns her wrath on her sister for … well, you name it. For being pregnant, for having bad taste in shower curtains, for hitting a woman in a bar fight.
The only thing that will eventually get through to Becca is a visit from Jason, the remorseful teenager who ran over her son. But instead of steam-rolling the young man (a somewhat tentative Matthew Judd), she gives him lemon bars and milk and asks him about his prom and his fiction-writing. This is an interview with the teenage son she will never have.
With heavy makeup and frizzy hair, Donadio swaps her trademark elegance for an uncharacteristically funny “Flashdance” attitude, and Fraulo, often so mordant, reveals a sweetly tender underside. Horton evinces a skillful performance by slowly depicting Howie’s own grief, exhaustion and frustration.
The show’s design team revels in the utter normality of the character’s fashion and decorating decisions. Jonathan Williamson’s set resembles nothing so much as a collision of a Pottery Barn catalog and an Ikea showroom. And Linda Patterson’s clothes are equally unremarkable.
“Rabbit Hole” burrows deep into an endless void of sadness while avoiding cliches of noisy prostration and overwrought emotion. Slowly and quietly, Becca and Howie move toward a place of light, love and forgiveness. Theirs is not a miraculous rebirth. But it’s a babystep.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Nov. 11. $22-$33. Theatre in the Square, 11 Whitlock Ave., Marietta 770-422-8369. theatrein thesquare.com
Bottom Line: A deeply moving portrait of grief — and grace.
Permalink | |
