A few minutes into the 35-or-so-minute Sea Wall, you know someone’s going to die.
This isn’t a spoiler. It’s a fact—and the realization washes over you like, well, like sea water as soon as Alex (played by Tom Sturridge) describes the titular aquatic barricade. “It drops down. Hundreds of feet,” he says in disbelief. “And swimming there, with the sun, even bright as it is above us…even then the darkness of the fall that the wall in the sea reveals is as terrifying as anything I’ve ever seen.”
From that moment on, all I can think about is someone—Alex, or his wife, Helen, or their daughter, Lucy, or Helen’s dad, who introduces Alex to the sea wall on a summer swim in the south of France—plunging to a soggy, shadowy death.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★ review here.]
Glaringly obvious ending aside, Simon Stephens’ play—the first half of a Carrie Cracknell–directed two-actor, two-monologue double bill, Sea Wall/A Life at the Public Theater—is pretty much what you’ve come to expect from the writer of On the Shore of the Wide World, Heisenberg, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (for which he won a 2015 Tony Award): dark, mysterious, and intellectual. Sometimes a bit too intellectual, in fact: Alex’s talks with Helen’s father about if there’s a God, where he is, what he looks like—“Is he 15 billion light years away? On the very edges of the Universe?”—feel shoehorned in.
The mood is considerably lighter in A Life, the breezy post-intermission solo play by Nick Payne starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Abe, an awestruck and overwhelmed father-to-be: “I didn’t realise you could plan a birth. In fact I think I thought the exact and contradictory opposite was the case.” But tragedy still looms large. Abe’s own father is dying. Again, this is not a spoiler. First there’s the tingling in the arms and legs (the cardiac equivalent of a loaded gun); then he needs an angioplasty; then they decide on a pacemaker; then his heart is failing; then his kidneys…and no one has even bothered to fill in Abe’s father. “We try to operate within a culture of optimism,” Abe recalls hearing from the doctors.
The story of his wife’s labor—their argument about names, her demands for Skittles, her I’m-gonna-throw-up threats—is hilarious and monumental: “The Nurse is saying something to my wife about having to release her inner animal.… My wife says she’s really sorry, she thinks she probably doesn’t have an inner animal. But the midwife isn’t gonna take that shit.” And the recollection of the talk with the doctor who pronounced his father dead is simple and perfect: “They tried for fifteen minutes to resuscitate him.… Fifteen minutes.… It sounds to me both like an incredibly long time and not nearly long enough.”
Considering that Gyllenhaal has starred in two of Payne’s previous plays—the dysfunctional family drama If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet and the Sliding Doors–style romantic two-hander Constellations—it’s no surprise that he’s so at home in Abe’s skin. The surprise is how honest, sometimes brutally so, Payne can be. “I don’t understand why we prepare so fucking wonderfully and elaborately for birth and yet so appallingly and haphazardly for death,” Abe declares. That line is now burned in my brain—and the next time I have to prepare for a death, I’ll remember it, and the audience’s knowing nods and sighs.
Sea Wall / A Life opened Feb. 14, 2018, and runs through March 31 at the Public Theater. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
