Rabbit Hole
We’re accustomed to a steady diet of TV hospital dramas in which actors play wild-eyed parents facing the sudden loss of their child: there’s the dreadful final flat-line, and then the weeping prostration. But grief is not only that most visible paroxysm at the hospital capitalized on by TV writers. As the months and years march on, the loss of sometime precious--particularly a young child--continues to reverberate in unexpected ways. With David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole, running on the upstairs Arcadia stage through Dec 20th, the Arden explores the many tributaries of guilt, sadness and hope in a grieving family.
Eight months after an accident claims the life of their 4-year-old son, Howie (Brian Russell) and Becca (Grace Gonglewski) are outwardly coping with their loss. But Becca’s flighty younger sister, Izzy (Julianna Zinkel) arrives with news that cracks Becca’s calm façade, pushing the family to reveal the agonizing web of tacit self-blame following the death of a child. When a teenager (Aaron Stall) involved in the in the fatal accident appears, Becca and Howie must face the pain of meeting the person who inadvertently wrought their anguish, but they also face the surprising ways an absolution could challenge the piece of their identity that has become bound up with their sorrow.
Rabbit Hole never becomes a maudlin reflection of grief, but uses the pain of loss to find deeper questions. The child’s death forces the family, Becca in particular, to consider how much their identities rely on their relationships with others. The play also asks whether we cope with our grief through the conviction that our suffering is unique--a part of our own individuality that others can’t dictate or understand.
Though Becca’s mother has also endured the loss of a son, Becca (ostensibly because of the vastly different circumstances of the deaths) refused to acknowledge that her mother suffers the same feelings Becca does, or that her mother could advise her on the course of her grief. In this way, the performance meditates not only on grief but also on the intractable necessity of a person’s emotional and spiritual boundaries--as well as the irony of the human tendency to isolate our own grief (or helplessly leave others to suffer alone) when grief is one of the ultimate products of a connection to someone else. Becca and Howie finally glimpse the possibility of moving on not because their pain has diminished, but because they’re willing to reconnect with their family and with each other.
Director James J. Christy is not afraid to dig into the play’s rich humor as much as its sadness, and builds beautiful, seamless evolutions of tone and conflict within the scenes. On opening night, when one character made a funny quip, Becca’s unexpected sob seemed to rise out of the audience’s laughter, and in the space of a moment, many in the audience cried with her. The audience was not just a witness, but a part of the scene’s emotion, reminded of the ways that crippling grief can weave in and out of the most mundane or even humorous moments.
Arden veteran Grace Gonglewski and Brian Russell, in the roles of the parents, give pitch-perfect portrayals of the way our worst thoughts and basest insecurities threaten the face we put on for the world - or even for our spouse. The different manifestations of their pain - and their healing- are sharply characterized. Julianna Zinkel, playing the childlike younger sister Izzy, feels a bit chirpy, contrived and physically overdone, particularly next to the magnetic, well-grounded heart of Gonglewski’s performance. Janis Dardaris as Izzy and Becca’s mother, Nat, brings some of the biggest laughs as well as some of the hardest truths, and Aaron Stall as anguished teenager Jason radiates a palpable earnestness.
Donald Eastman’s graceful set glides from one scene to the next, with proscenium-type layers in melancholy purplish-blues that evoke the play’s emotional layering. But the little boy’s room, a key space in the story, strikes a potentially false note. It is utterly neat, even sterile, its too-high, impeccably arranged shelves lacking personality beyond the toy helicopter and dinosaurs that indicate a boy’s room. It looks more like a bedroom in a catalogue than a room that held a lively, living little boy, evoking a generic nostalgia rather than adding any insight to the child and therefore his parents’ mourning.
Arden Theatre Company’s Rabbit Hole continues through December 20th on the Arden’s Arcadia Stage, 40 N. 2nd Street, Old City Philadelphia. For more information visit Arden Theatre Company website.
Arden Theatre Company’s Rabbit Hole continues through December 20th on the Arden’s Arcadia Stage, 40 N. 2nd Street, Old City Philadelphia. For more information visit www.ardentheater.org
