Inside the Rabbit Hole with Janis Dardaris
Earlier this year, Janis Dardaris gave one of the year’s most compelling performances in the harrowing political drama Scorched, which played at the Wilma Theatre. She played the mother of victims of terrorism who, in the course of the play, confronts a barbarous world. It was an unforgettable performance, and Dardaris won a well deserved Barrymore for it.
She is now playing the boozy, ranting Nat in the Arden Theatre’s production of Rabbit Hole, the Pulitzer Prize winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by James J. Christy. It deals with a family trying to piece their lives back together after multiple tragedies.
In this play, though, Dardaris’ character is comic relief, with wacky clothes, insensitive diatribes about the Kennedy family and fueled by her endless couple of glasses of wine.
"I get to make people laugh, even with this subject, so from my point of view, it is not as emotionally difficult as Scorched," Dardaris said in a phone interview last week.
Nat’s daughter Becca, played memorably by Grace Gonglewski, is in an inconsolable cyclone of grief in the months after the death of her four year old son. Nat, in her wayward attempts to help her daughter, does her part in aggravating a very tragic and delicate situation.
Nat is cartoonish, but there is duality in Nat. She is herself a grieving woman, who lost her own son to drugs years before the events of the play.
Dardaris said that the subject of grief was skirted in the regular production talks, "but during a preview we had a discussion about the day Becca’s son dies and it became so real for us. It was a group breakthrough in handling the realism in the play." Dardaris said.
Dardaris and Gonglewski carve a palpable mother-daughter dynamic onstage that gets very testy, but works as great stage chemistry.
"You don’t know until you hear, with material like, this if you are connecting with the audience, because of the themes in this play," Dardarnis observed. "It’s messy and feels psychologically rocky and dangerous... to get to this acceptance between the mother and the daughter."
www.ardentheatre.org
Rabbit Hole plays at Arden Theatre through Dec. 10.
