Some people just have to get something off their chest. They’re so intent on it that they’re ready to unburden themselves to anybody, even to strangers, maybe even preferably to strangers.
Count among these determined speakers Alex (Tom Sturridge) and Abe (Jake Gyllenhaal), who are bursting so compulsively with talk that they’ve corralled no less than an entire audience to whom they direct, respectively. Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall and Nick Payne’s A Life in the absolutely hypnotic dual monologues Sea Wall/A Life.
Pushing up an off-stage lever to give himself light (Guy Hoare handles the subtle lighting throughout), Sturridge’s Alex presents himself in what is a difficult confession, one that he never actually gets around to. He seems to want to exculpate himself of the worst thing he has ever done, but before he can get to the whatever it is, he skids from topic to topic.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
He chats uncomfortably about his belief that the proof of God lies with the mathematical term pi, claiming that only God’s existence could account for the term’s indisputability. He describes a scuba-diving episode involving a sea wall and his sensations experiencing underwater weight. He drops any number of topical references, to Danny DeVito, Daniel Craig, Reservoir Dogs, James Elroy. A photographer, Alex talks about his lieutenant colonel father, who would never discuss his Falklands War tour.
In time, he gets around to his wife Helen and daughter Lucy. He solemnly reports witnessing Lucy’s fall from a cliff (another sea wall?) during a swimming vacation with her dad, Arthur. He goes into the tragic aftermath, stalling only when he’s about to reveal what he so horrifically said at the time to Arthur. His exposed grief becomes at last the explanation for the abiding diffidence, a gnawing uncertainly that leaves him unable to know what to make of existence but hoping that knowing might someday come to him.
Gyllenhaal’s Abe has a similar, yet dissimilar story to tell, which also includes a father-son as well as a father-daughter relationship. Birth and death—themes that urgently link Sea Wall and A Life—are cogitated as Abe is so fixed on his father’s death and his daughter’s birth that he blends them into one burning anecdote.
Indeed, the listener(s) he’s buttonholed (read, the audience) may have the occasional challenge in following just what and whom he’s on about. Not to worry. The memory-melding is a reflection of his being overwhelmed by both the facts of life’s beginning and end. There’s a point at which he becomes so charged with boundless energy that he leaves the spotlight in which he’s been standing to race off the stage, circle the Hudson Theatre auditorium and even shuffle through a row of ticket buyers—“You can go back to sleep,” he says to one of them.
During an interlude between the moving father-daughter discourse, he reports on the chat he had with his long-time girlfriend about their perhaps tying the knot. The halting exchange between them stands as one of the most charming love scenes written since George and Emily first shared a soda in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
Bravos to Gyllenhaal and Sturridge for flawless performances. Their acting has to be viewed as outstanding examples of contemporary naturalism. They gesture constantly, mumble (audibly), stumble and stutter on words, assume the intermittent uncomfortable posture. Masters of their technique, they use charm profitably, with Gyllenhaal, playing the less dark figure, reaping any number of laughs. (Both had the opportunity to hone their roles when Sea Wall/A Life was presented last season at the Public Theater—which isn’t to say they weren’t surpassingly good then.)
Surely, Stephens (the superlative The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and On the Shore of the Wide World) and Payne (this is his third production with Gyllenhaal, Constellations, among them), are grateful to Gyllenhaal and Sturridge for bringing to explosive manifestation two men intended to be representative of a guy—Abe is clearly American—and a bloke—Alex has that pronounced English accent—who are so much of our moment. Curiously, both men allude to the not-so-recent television series ER. Their director is Carrie Cracknell, who sure-as-shootin’ knows what she’s doing.
The men do their unstoppable communicating on Laura Jellinek’s intentionally spare set, which is little more than a brick-wall stage with a rickety staircase leading to an upper walkway (Alex knocks some unidentifiable something off it in his first scary climb), a small table with a lamp and chair (none of it ever used) and an upright piano on which Gyllenhaal picks out a bit of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a tune that neatly ties into the A Life plot.
Luke Halls provides a late projection subtly implying that Alex and Abe are stand-ins for any number of men everywhere trying to make sense of life as we live it and only having the flimsiest success in their daily groping. That finale lifts an already exceptional production to an even higher plane.
Sea Wall/A Life opened august 8, 2019, at Hudson Theatre and runs through September 29. Tickets and information: seawallalife.com
