Ordinary Sites of Transgression (review)

The intransigence of loss courses through David Harrower's internationally acclaimed play Blackbird. Written with particular attention to the fragmentary nature of thought (and how thought and its expression is revelatory of fragmented souls) the play is a modestly scaled two hander that is nonetheless epic in scope. Using the interrogatory as its main linguistic and structural element, Blackbird pits a woman named Una (played by Allison Pill), who was abused repeatedly as twelve-year-old, against her former abuser, an older man named Ray (played by Jeff Daniels). The text unwaveringly stays fixed on the confrontation between these two damaged individuals as they thrust and parry, reacquaint themselves with each other, and re-play old patterns of behavior and language.

Although the piece fits into what has become a recognizable genre of trauma drama—a genre that in recent years has focused more and more on pedophilia and its after-effects—it manages primarily by virtue of Harrower's forceful and elliptical way with language to skirt the queasy comfort of the familiar. For Harrower, as in his previous works Knives in Hens, Kill the Old Torture Their Young, Dark Earth, and Presence, language is not in concert with but rather at odds with nature and the body. The erotic charge in his work, thus, comes from the disjunction between thought and action, and in inchoate and perhaps unreliable manifestations of feeling.

Joe Mantello's staging sensitively reflects Harrower's text of brokenness (broken souls uttering equally broken sentences) by keeping the action, as Harrower suggests, confined to a nondescript conference room. Here in a site of complete and utter ordinariness, transgressions of the past bleed uncomfortably into the present as Una and Ray battle, seduce, and court their buried and alternately openly aggressive and tender feelings toward each other. Mantello anchors Ray (played with eerie warmth and disdain by Daniels) physically and lets Una (played with mercurial bursts of emotion and wiry vulnerability) loose about the stage. As Una interrogates Ray, her manner becomes more and more harried. Meanwhile Ray maintains a slow burn of recognition and neglect toward the memory of the twelve-year-old girl he once abused and who carries the stain of his abuse on her psyche as corrosively as Nathaniel Hawthorne's "A" emblazoned on Hester Prynne's bosom in The Scarlet Letter.

Indeed, it is worth remarking how Harrower no doubt unwittingly mirrors Hawthorne's territory of psychological and physical punishment in Blackbird. Rather than a more admittedly modern sense of liberation and release from the past, and the prospect of healing from trauma, Harrower maintains Una and Ray locked in an unforgiving (and unforgivable) dance of desire and repulsion to the very end. Mantello underlines in his staging the polarized nature of Una and Ray's entanglement and keeps his actors still for the duration of much of their longest arias. He allows Harrower's language to hang in the air, sometimes uncomfortably through unsettled, charged pauses and silences, and orchestrates vaguely stylized lighting from Paul Gallo to punctuate highly still stretches of scenes.

Through it all there is a heavy, perhaps even foreboding sense of how relentlessly ordinary Una and Ray's situation is. Contained in the anonymous conference room setting designed with keen eye for detail and scale by Scott Pask, the play takes place on a set that could serve just as well for any number of office plays. The site is deliberately undistinguished and plain (until the garbage from the waste bins in the conference room is thrown about in Una's rage). Just once the set revolves to show the office where Ray and his colleagues work and the office glimpsed is also surprisingly ordinary—a site anyone in the audience can imagine themselves spending within the course of a day's work. By heightening the ordinary through the scenic design and costume design (by Laura Bauer), yet stylizing the use of lighting and sound (subliminal sound design by Darron L. West), Mantello creates a...