"An Uncommon Woman, An Uncommon Play"
What is Theatre? asks the title of a book by renowned
critic Eric Bentley. It’s a question that can never be answered definitively as creative
theatremakers continue to find new and surprising answers. This season, for
example, the Vineyard Theatre, not especially known for experimental work, has
been exploring the nature of theatre by testing the proximity of the staged to
the lived experience through the presentation of plays that use the actual
words spoken by strong women who faced dire circumstances.
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| Deirdre O'Connell. All photos: Carol Rosegg. |
Who would have thought that an actress, sitting alone
in a detailed replica of a tacky Florida motel room (designed by Andrew Boyce),
the bed unmade, lip-syncing someone’s actual words recorded in an interview,
could be so piercingly effective? But Dana’s story and O’Connell’s uncanny
ability to incarnate her without so much as a peep from her own voice makes
this one piece of theatre that is absolutely not to be missed.
Hnath—who keeps impressing with provocatively
entertaining plays like The
Thin Place, Hillary
and Clinton, and A
Doll’s House Part 2—has created Dana
H. by editing hours of interviews with his mother conducted in 2015 by Steve
Cosson (artistic director of the investigative theatre company, The Civilians). During
the 75-minute presentation, the only others we see are a stagehand, who fulfills
a technical task at the start, and a motel maid (uncredited).
The latter appears about three quarters of the way through,
after Dana has exited, to make up the bed and clean the room to the
accompaniment of sound designer Mikhail Fiksel’s mix of ultrafast audio clips and
an accelerating musical score. Meanwhile, Paul Toben’s lights pop on and off in
rapid, phantasmagoric sequences, a device intensifying our desire for Dana to
return and provide the resolution to her dangling story.
At the beginning, Dana introduces herself as a
hospital chaplain counseling people with dying loved ones, and the dying as
well, easing their passage to the other side, a practice she provides across
religious lines. The essence of her tale, however, concerns what happened in
1997, when Lucas was in college, after she began counseling a sociopathic, white
supremacist, recently released from prison. His name was Jim and he was a walking keg of TNT, trained in
criminal behavior from childhood. Despite his therapeutic reliance on
Dana, he kidnapped and beat her, used her as an accomplice, and even raped her.
Dana’s plight, exacerbated by the failure of most
police to help her (it’s her word against his), is expressed in emotionally restrained
yet electrically charged terms. She is obviously a woman of awesome inner strength
(she believes her having been beaten by her own parents helped her cope with
Jim’s violence), forcing us to consider what we might have done under similar
circumstances. Even the story of the aftermath to her traumatic experience
displays a character of incredible resilience. She’s the embodiment of what it
takes to be someone who helps people suffering from what her program bio
describes as “the effects of trauma, loss, and life threatening or life
limiting issues.”
O’Connell, one of New York’s finest and most regularly seen actresses (The
Way West, Scarcity),
was trained to lip-sync by Steve Cuiffo. So effective was his tutelage, aided
by the on-point direction of Les Waters, that it’s impossible to detect where
the recording leaves off and the lip-syncing begins.
Not only is her timing perfect—the verbal stumbles,
the coughs, the hesitations, and the like—but her behavior so convincingly conveys
the possible facial expressions, gestures, physical tics, and movements of
Hnath’s mother, it’s impossible to believe she isn’t speaking the words with
her own voice. O’Connell is talented enough to have spoken the lines themselves
but there’s no denying that hearing Dana's memories emanating from the controlled
but quietly expressive voice of the woman who endured them is what makes Dana H. the must-see and must-hear play
of the moment.
Vineyard Theatre
108 E. 15th St., NYC
Through March 29 (Extended through April 11)
