Theatre lab gets to heart of loss in ‘Rabbit Hole’

Burying a child is perhaps one of the most unnatural occurrences in human life. Parents banish the thought from their conscious minds. Grandparents shiver at the idea. Truly, as a culture, the unthinkable and the unbearable almost always have to do with small children. When we hear about a child’s death, we mourn with the most heartsick tears possible.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire was drawn to that chilling territory after the birth of his own son because one of his mentors told him to lunge toward his fears in his writing. And lunge he did – right into a deep, dark rabbit hole.

Indeed, his script “Rabbit Hole” looks into the devastated lives of a couple faced with such a horror. Schoodic Arts Meetinghouse Theatre Lab is presenting Lindsay-Abaire’s play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama earlier this week, through Sunday, April 22, at Hammond Hall in Winter Harbor.

The story opens with Becca, a New York City professional turned suburban housewife, folding clothes while her feisty, bar-hopping sister Izzy outlines a recent fist fight she had. The scene is cheerful and antagonistic in a sisterly way. But as the exchange between the sisters builds, it becomes clear that something raw and silent separates them.

It’s not the elephant but rather the shadow of a dead boy that looms in the room. The clothes in Becca’s hands are those of Danny, her 4-year-old son who was killed when he chased his dog into the street. And Izzy, it turns out, is pregnant.

Those two details spin the play forward and twirl its characters – Becca, Izzy, their mother Nat and Becca’s husband, Howie – far into uncharted territory of sorrow, anger and isolation. As Becca tries to erase the memory of Danny, Howie tries to preserve it. In one of the play’s most gut-wrenching scenes, Howie finds Becca has mistakenly taped over the most current home movie of Danny. The permanence, already marked by the boy’s death, pierces a new psychological dimension in this moment when even technology conspires to separate parents and child.

Director Charles Alexander has jumped into a difficult theatrical challenge: the naturalistic play. Unlike the characters in “Alice in Wonderland,” Lindsay-Abaire’s are more everyday types. So the nuances of their feelings are often buried below the surface of their words, and plumbing those depths takes extraordinary skill. When the show ran in New York City last year, Cynthia Nixon (“Sex in the City”) played Becca, an indication of the energy this story requires. Alexander can’t quite reproduce that level of freneticism with community actors, but he does get at the sorrowful hearts in this family. Still, the blank space between lines of dialogue and the deafening silence between scene changes don’t serve this production’s overall impact of mourning. They simply draw out the evening.

And yet, something very poignant rises from this community cast. It’s not only that Tim McCormick’s stage design of a suburban house uses the Hammond Hall space to good effect. But also the members work so hard to keep the action going, to make their lines real, to bring the audience in. And while it seems that another week of rehearsals might have generally increased the pacing, Mellie Anderson lowers herself into Becca’s despair, and Ned Kelly’s Howie never goes overboard with his pain and frustration. As Izzy, Sophia Bates finds a snappy performance style, and Derek Murphy, as the young man driving the car that hit Danny, reveals the youthful guilt and fright of a powerless player in this drama. Voiceovers by Bjorn Collins as young Danny are, of course, haunting.

Of all the cast members, Susan Dreier, as the mother of Becca and Izzy, provides the most believable portrait of a woman who has lived through more than just the “Kennedy curse” which serves as one of her obsessive diatribes. She, too, lost a son years earlier; he was older and drugs got him, but that doesn’t change much in her mind about the pain. Dreier’s delivery shows wit, intelligence and an flair for comic timing.

Cynthia Thayer adds another dimension in her playbill poem “On the First Anniversary of Her Death,” a penetrating work of inconsolable loss.

In the end, it’s curiouser and curiouser to me that small, outlying theater groups take on such profoundly knotty dramas. A producer for “Rabbit Hole” explained it to me this way: “If I’m going to sit through a two-hour show, I want to feel something. I don’t care what it is. I just want to feel it.” It’s likely that very few will walk out of this show without feeling something.

Of Lindsay-Abaire’s works, “Rabbit Hole” is not my favorite (“Fuddy Meers” is.) That said, it’s worth applauding the Meetinghouse Theatre Lab for presciently and bravely staging this year’s Pulitzer winner in an unlikely location.

Speaking of location: “Behind the Apron,” a visual arts show by local spinners, weavers and other artists, is on display concurrently at Hammond Hall. A variety of domestic stories emerge from these works, all of which are worth pondering during intermission. This show is far less sad than the one onstage.

Schoodic Arts Meetinghouse Theatre Lab will perform “Rabbit Hole” 7 p.m. April 20 and 21 and 2 p.m. April 22 at Hammond Hall in Winter Harbor. For more information, call 963-2569. “Behind the Apron” runs through May, and a multimedia arts event will be held 7:30 p.m. May 4 at Hammond Hall. For information about the apron event only, call 244-3702.