A tense confrontation crackling with drama
Lights: bang up. From the first moment, when about a million fluorescent watts dazzle us in Theatre Exile's production of Blackbird, the air fairly hums with electricity. The nasty, expectant room - drab, full of rubbish and ugly plastic chairs - warns us: Something is about to happen. Sit up. Pay attention. Wait.
Lights: bang up. From the first moment, when about a million fluorescent watts dazzle us in Theatre Exile's production of
Blackbird
, the air fairly hums with electricity. The nasty, expectant room - drab, full of rubbish and ugly plastic chairs - warns us: Something is about to happen. Sit up. Pay attention. Wait.
What is about to happen is that a young woman (Julianna Zinkel) will turn up to confront a middle-aged man (Pearce Bunting) at his workplace. They have not seen each other in 15 years; they were, in their own ways, in love with each other. The arithmetic is the shocker: 15 years ago, she was 12.
David Harrower's remarkable script convinces us, gradually and delicately, that this relationship was far more complex than any easy psychosocial clichés can explain, and the playwright swings us up and back, again and again, between outrage and sympathy.
Though the two never leave the awful room, their monologues so vividly evoke past events that we believe we're seeing what they're remembering. His voice breaks, boyishly, as he recounts the defining moment of his life. These are two blazing, passionate performances.
Because the performances are so subtly nuanced, we are wrenched out of any prefab condemnations or assumptions. At first, her gestures seem suspiciously seductive: the smiles, the wide open arms, then posing coyly against the door, while he stands stock still. He turns his head to look at her just as she turns her head away from him. The mood shifts seem to be the work of a precision instrument: Suspicion and rage and grief and passion cascade and overtake them. Joe Canuso's superb direction has found a choreography of horrifying yearning.
Rachel Moffat's costuming is telling: Bunting, his hair unbecomingly cleancut, wears gray trousers and a white shirt, Zinkel a short green dress that reveals her slim figure without looking skimpy or tarty. The set (by Matt Saunders) suggests exactly the grim, institutional workaday world where everybody hates his job. The lighting (Paul Moffitt) carries much of the play's drama and actually makes the audience gasp.
The mysterious title invites speculation: Poe's raven, which says "Nevermore"? Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"? "Four and twenty baked in a pie"? Or you might want to speculate about the ways this play is both like and unlike Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive or Nabokov's Lolita. This is 80 minutes of theater that will last for a while.
Blackbird
Theatre Exile at Plays & Players, 1714 Delancey St. Through
March 1. Tickets $15-$30.
Information: 215-218-4022
EndText