First impressions might suggest otherwise. But Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.,” a one-woman drama that explodes expectations at every turn, is one of the richest, most complete works of theater to come along in many seasons. And by its end, you realize that its singular power could be achieved only in real time, on a stage, with a live audience as its witness.
Watching the early moments of this production, which opened on Tuesday night at the Vineyard Theater, you may wonder, a bit impatiently, why its account of a violent kidnapping is being told in the way it is. “Dana H” is not a conventionally scripted or acted drama.
It is, or at first appears to be, a rather basic documentary work, which consists almost entirely of a recorded interview with the title character. (In some ways, it is a perfect companion piece to the uncanny documentary play “Is This A Room,” recently staged at the Vineyard.) The subject is Dana Higginbotham, a Florida hospice chaplain — and the playwright’s mother — who was held hostage for five months by a psychotic client, and who is indeed telling her own story.
But while it is Higginbotham’s voice we hear, she is not the woman who appears onstage. We see instead the wonderful actress Deirdre O’Connell, who mouths, with near-perfect specificity, what is said on the recording. It is, in other words, a deliberately limited performance, stripped of a whole layer of interpretation that O’Connell might bring to the part if she were allowed to speak it herself.
Yet that implicit distance between performer and character winds up bringing us closer to both. As directed with virtuosic pace and shading by Les Waters, this first-person account of a season in hell becomes an ever-deepening exercise in concentrated listening — and a journey into an empathy so intimate that it melts the boundaries of your own sense of a solid self.
At the center of “Dana H.,” a coproduction of Vineyard, Center Theater Group and the Goodman Theater, is a tale about an unspeakable violation of autonomous self, one so upsetting it perhaps can be approached only by the staggered degrees that give this work its form. Higginbotham says in the recording that this is the first time she has ever talked this explicitly about what happened to her during those five months in 1998. “I can’t be who I am with people,” she says. “I can’t tell people about this.”
She had certainly never spoken about it in such terms to her son, Hnath, a dramatist of quicksilver intellect and probing compassion who was a college student in New York at the time of his mother’s abduction. Hnath, whose earlier works include “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Hillary and Clinton,” did not conduct the interviews that make up “Dana H.” The other voice we hear in the recording belongs to Hnath’s friend, the writer and director Steve Cosson, who conducted the sessions nearly two decades after the events took place.
Those sessions occurred over several days and have been pieced together into a production that is said to last 75 minutes, though what you experience eludes any usual measurement of time. No one here is pretending that what occurs onstage is a facsimile of the interviews.
The tapes include the distortions of a do-it-yourself recording project, with its prickly static and wandering amplification. (Mikhail Fiksel did the crucial sound design.) We periodically hear metallic beeps, to indicate editing and elisions.
Supertitles are projected, dividing the show into self-contained segments (“A Patient Named Jim,” “The Next Five Months,” “The Bridge”). Well, sort of, since what is being discussed here renders all dividing lines arbitrary and inadequate.
And of course from the beginning, we know that O’Connell is not Higginbotham. We watch the actress being fitted with the earpieces that will pour her character’s voice into her head, allowing her to concentrate fully on the arduous task of precisely lip-syncing every word she hears.
We are thus deliberately made aware of the conscious exertion required for this process. But there’s a point, maybe five or ten minutes into the show, in which O’Connell’s effort to become another person melt into Higginbotham’s struggle to describe a chapter in her life that still feels, in many ways, beyond imagining. (She occasionally consults a well-worn manuscript she has written, like a talisman that might bring order to chaos.)
As Higginbotham’s voice stumbles, stutters and trails into silence — while O’Connell’s face subtly registers the ache and exasperation of words failing their speaker — a part of us can’t help leaning in, silently and forcefully willing her to continue. What follows may be deeply upsetting to hear, but there’s a sense that it has to be given voice.
It says much about this show’s power that I have had to rise from my desk and pace before even trying to summarize the events at the heart of “Dana H.” The play’s catalyst is Jim, a former convict and member of the Aryan Brotherhood, whom Higginbotham mentored at a psychiatric ward after he tried to kill himself.
He became increasingly reliant on her. And one night, when she wouldn’t open the door of her Florida house to him, he broke in through the bathroom window. He hit her with the home alarm system he had ripped off the wall, knocking her unconscious. “That was the beginning of the end,” Higginbotham says. “That was the beginning of the next five months.”
What followed was a life on the road, and on the lam, with an abductor who told his captive that he was the only person in the world who could protect her. She is beaten and raped and is (by her own admission) an unreliable witness to Jim’s other, often violent crimes.
She also comes to feel that she has entered a claustrophobic underworld, a parallel universe that has no connection to what she once thought of as real life. A part of her thinks that she was a natural victim for Jim. And when she explains why she feels this way, your heart cracks open.
You have probably come across newspaper or television accounts of survivors of similar crimes, and registered them with a shivery, prurient detachment. “Dana H.” allows no such self-protecting sense of remove. Higginbotham’s descent into a black hole that erases the most basic outlines of selfhood is mirrored here by stealthy, perception-warping stagecraft.
I won’t elaborate except to say that the contributions of the lighting designer Paul Toben are essential. So is Andrew Boyce’s set, which summons a dingy, mildewed generic motel room. As the show proceeds, a room that you may not have paid much attention to at first will assert a stranglehold on both the woman seated at its center and on your imagination.
Even when she leaves the room, she’s still there. So are you.
Dana H.
Tickets Through March 29 at Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; 212-353-0303, vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
