In recent seasons, Lucas Hnath has risen to prominence as an award-winning playwright with his out of the ordinary dramas such as Hillary and Clinton, Red Speedo, and especially A Doll’s House, Part 2, which many companies have produced since its Broadway debut in 2017.
Hnath’s latest play, Dana H., which opened Tuesday at the Vineyard Theatre, is an extremely personal work since it depicts his own mother.
This is an amazing real-life story. Hnath’s mother, Dana Higginbotham, was employed as a chaplain in a psychiatric unit in a Florida hospital. In 1997, when Hnath was studying at New York University, Dana was assaulted and kidnapped by a patient.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Dana’s abductor, Jim, was a suicidal ex-convict with ties to the Aryan Brotherhood (with the tattoos to match). Somehow Jim kept Dana captive for five months as he stashed her away in motels around Florida. Hidden in plain view, the disoriented Dana did not manage to escape until Jim finally flipped out in a violent episode.
Without telling too much of this tale, let’s only note that in the aftermath of her ordeal, Dana did not manage to return to her family for two more years. It’s a strange story.
Dana H. and its production turn out to be unusual as well.
Rather than dramatize his mother’s nightmare in a conventional manner, Hnath connected Dana with Steve Cosson, the artistic director of The Civilians, who interviewed her in a series of taped sessions in 2015. Then working with sound designer Mikhail Fiksel, the playwright edited and shaped the actual recordings into a soundtrack.
Accompanied by a backstage crew member, Deirdre O’Connell walks onto designer Andrew Boyce’s realistic setting of a dreary motel room. The technician wires up the actor with earbuds and leaves her sitting on a chair in the middle of the room. O’Connell blinks towards the control booth and soon starts to lip-sync Dana’s voice as she tells her story.
The 70-minute soundtrack cultivates a deliberate rawness as Dana’s ugly experiences are patched together, along with obvious blips and background noises, with some of Cosson’s questions and empathetic responses. Meanwhile, Les Waters, the director, keeps O’Connell literally a captive seated in that chair as she silently relates Dana’s abduction along with the soundtrack.
An exceptional actor, O’Connell precisely matches her lips to Dana’s voice while her eloquent face, eyes, and surprisingly minimal body language convey the woman’s fearful emotions. It is a remarkably expressive performance.
Perhaps two thirds of the way through the narrative, events become so overwhelming that the soundtrack and Paul Toben’s lighting design go totally haywire with a crescendo of overlapping voices, wildly fluctuating lighting, and other intense effects. At this critical point, I could not figure out what was happening, frankly, and probably was not the only spectator to feel temporarily adrift.
Subsequently, the remainder of Dana’s narrative seems like an extended epilogue, complete with unexplained mysteries of its own and sidebar anecdotes regarding her work as a chaplain in a hospice assisting people to gently leave this world. Possibly the playwright intends to point to Dana’s deeply spiritual nature as an explanation of how she was able to survive those terrible months spent with a violent madman.
Although the harrowing story of Dana H. does not entirely satisfy, and Hnath’s experiment with a soundtrack approach to its stage realization seems too tricky for its own good, Deirdre O’Connell delivers a vital, authentic performance that anchors the work in the truth that it hopes to tell.
