Few losses are as devastating as the death of a young child.
In David Lindsay-Abaire’s play “Rabbit Hole,” Howie (Patrick “Patty” Morris) and Becca (Meredith Tierney-Fife) are slogging through grief after their 4-year-old son Danny is struck by a car and killed. Danny ran into the street after the family dog, and as the car’s teenage driver, Jason (Owen Hines), swerved to avoid hitting the dog, he struck the boy. Becca had left her son outside to answer a phone call from her younger, irresponsible sister Izzy (Alyson Shook).
The siblings’ mother Nat (Emmalyse Wozniak) has some insight into what the family is going through as she lost her 30-year-old son to suicide, but Becca rejects her mother’s attempts at offering comfort.
“Rabbit Hole,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2007, is the first production this school year from the University of Maine’s School of the Performing Arts. The play takes place in the suburbs of New York City during a time before cell phones, when family events were recorded and replayed on VCRs.
Directed by Julie Arnold Lisnet, it is a stinging and stunning production featuring astonishingly fine and insightful performances by a group of five young actors, four of whom have never before stepped foot on the stage at Hauck Auditorium.
“Rabbit Hole” is about grieving “but it is also about coming out the other side of that grief,” the director wrote in the program notes. Lisnet, fresh off successfully ushering in “Crimes of the Heart” for Penobscot Theatre Company’s 50th season, knows how to create an ensemble that portrays a family, especially one that is a wee bit dysfunctional. She has drawn performances out of her actors that are layered, insightful, touching and wise far beyond their years.
Morris, who was an energetic and delightful Benedick this summer in Ten Bucks Theatre’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” gives a devastating and believable performance as a father struggling to cope with his son’s death. His efforts to stay connected emotionally and physically to Becca, who rejects them, are portrayed with heartbreaking sincerity. But it is his understandably angry reaction to the accidental loss of videos of Danny that breaks the hearts of theatergoers.
As Becca, Tierney-Fife, a first-year student, portrays a mother wracked with guilt and sorrow. She suffers alone, refusing, until the play’s conclusion, to accept comfort from her family but is able to meet with Jason as a way to find some sort of closure. Her performance is pitch perfect.
Shook’s Izzy is a ditzy, self-centered young adult whose attempts to help Becca enjoy life again are met with criticism. The second-year student gives the play much of its humor in a finely tuned turn.
The part of Jason is a bit underwritten, but Hines, a first-year student, shows how responsible the 17-year-old feels for Danny’s death and how much Jason needs to atone for it by meeting with Danny’s parents. This is a guileless and honest portrayal.
And then there is Wozniak, who gives a tour de force performance as the boozy, blousy, bottled blonde Nat, mother to Becca and Izzy. One of the hardest things for student actors to do is to convincingly portray characters decades their senior, but Wozniak manages that and makes it look easy.
Seeing her on stage, it is hard to believe that Wozniak also is in her first year at the university. She successfully wears Nat’s grief over the loss of her son and grandson like a well-worn, much loved sweater that has become part of her. Wozniak gives a stunning and memorable performance especially when she describes living with grief as carrying around a brick in a pocket.
Daniel Bilodeau’s set puts Danny’s bedroom at the edge of the stage. The audience watches the bulk of the action in the living room and kitchen through the boy’s room still full of his toys, his bed covered by a robot-themed bedspread. This makes theatergoers keenly aware of the child’s absence but also of his presence in the household.
The lighting and sound design by JP Sedlock and costumes by Michelle Handley work seamlessly with Bilodeau’s design. Sedlock’s selection of pop songs used to bridge the play’s scenes is outstanding. Especially poignant is the use of Roberta Flack’s “The First Time I Saw Your Face” as Howie watches videos of his son in the dark.
There is an unusually large number of shows to choose from this weekend. Penobscot Theatre Company premieres an original show, “Dirty Deeds Downeast” at the Bangor Opera House. Some Theatre Company is producing “The Exorcist” and Ten Bucks Theatre Company is presenting “Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike” at their respective spaces in the Bangor Mall.
Any of those can be seen next weekend but “Rabbit Hole,” which was set to open last week, lost those performances to sickness in the cast. About 40 people attend Thursday’s opening performance, nearly all of them students.
Theater lovers in Greater Bangor need to see this incredibly moving and thoughtful production to support the theater program at the university. These young actors are the performers and technical crew that professional and community theater companies in Maine will rely on to thrive in the future and they deserve a full house and a couple of standing ovations.
“Rabbit Hole” will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in Hauck Auditorium at the University of Maine in Orono. Visit umaine.edu/spa for more information.