.Good Grief

Town Hall's Rabbit Hole grapples with loss.

Clive Worsley’s first season as artistic director at Town Hall
Theatre Company of Lafayette was mostly programmed by his predecessor
Kevin Morales before the latter headed off for New York.

Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire’s 1997 Pulitzer Prize
winning examination of grief, is the kind of challenging drama that
Morales always said that the company should be doing. He was known for
making quirky choices in his seasons, placing the hard-hitting
Wit alongside Gypsy and a superhero-themed
Macbeth. For this season Morales had originally programmed two
Lindsay-Abaire plays in a row, with the amnesia comedy Fuddy
Meers
slated to follow Rabbit Hole, but Worsley opted to
replace Fuddy with the female version of Neil Simon’s The Odd
Couple
in late March — which he’ll direct around the same
time Morales comes back to helm Contra Costa Musical Theatre’s
Evita.

Packed with uncomfortable moments and unexpected humor, the sharp
script centers around a young couple who recently lost their son Danny
in an auto accident. Director Susannah Martin stages a solid production
that nicely captures the mind of the play, if not always its heart. The
creative team is mostly new to Town Hall, largely from risk-taking
companies on the other side of the tunnel such as Shotgun Players and
foolsFURY, but it’s hard to watch the play without a growing sense of
how much more could be done with the roles.

Ryan O’Donnell is perfectly amiable as mild-mannered husband Howie,
whose grief is subsumed by his need to comfort his bitter, brittle wife
Becca. Howie takes some comfort in reminders of Danny, while Becca just
wants to hide them away. O’Donnell’s understated performance is more
convincing as the gentle peacemaker than when Howie gets upset, because
there hasn’t necessarily been a sense that the emotions that pour out
have been present all along.

Csilla Horvath-Lewis’s overstated Becca has the opposite problem. A
look of dread nearing panic is etched on her face half the time, her
performance pitched so high that it has nowhere to go when the going
gets rougher. She’s also a pill and a scold, and the fact that Becca’s
supposed to be difficult to be around doesn’t make her any
easier to take.

Emily Morrison is a breath of fresh air as Becca’s free-spirit
sister Izzy, a live wire who becomes increasingly fidgety in the
stifling air of the house. Sally Hogarty is chirpy and animated as
Becca’s mother Nat, running around making oversized gestures and
blithely rattling on about rich people dying in plane crashes and
skiing accidents. Liam Callister is appropriately earnest with a dash
of adolescent cluelessness as Jason, the teenager who accidentally hit
Danny with his car.

Of course, you don’t go to a Lafayette community theater with the
same expectations that you might have had driving down to see San Jose
Rep’s acclaimed 2007 production of the same play. It’s refreshing to
see a play like this in Contra Costa now and then instead of Neil Simon
or Agatha Christie.

The trouble is, the lack of nuance in the performances draws
attention to the mechanics of the script. The play sometimes becomes a
kind of treatise on grieving, exploring not only the various ways that
different people need to mourn but also the way people around them
respond to their loss. Some friends avoid them because they don’t know
what to say, and others impose themselves constantly just to be there
for people who don’t particularly want them there.

The production elements of Martin’s staging are particularly strong,
especially Nina Ball’s terrific set of an immaculately detailed and
seemingly long-stagnant suburban home, with toys tucked away in corners
of bookcases and under the lip of the raised kitchen floor and Danny’s
outer-space-themed bedroom visible through a screen. Costumer Rebecca
Redmond provides funky outfits for Izzy and more conservative suburban
getups for the couple, and Chris Guptill’s lights accentuate the gloom
and nicely mimic the flicker of a television.

Speaking of loss, the tough economic climate has been particularly
hard on the newspaper business, so this is will be my last review in
the paper for the foreseeable future. Good luck to the Express,
and keep supporting your local theaters. East Bay companies have some
exciting stuff coming up in the next few months that should be well
worth whatever effort it takes to find out about it, and I hope to see
you there.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

East Bay Express E-edition East Bay Express E-edition
19,045FansLike
14,598FollowersFollow
61,790FollowersFollow
spot_img