The best way to describe Dana H., the new play by Lucas Hnath at the Vineyard, is to call it indescribable and leave it at that. Which simply won’t do; that in itself doesn’t begin to suggest how the combination of play, production, and a performance by Deirdre O’Connell makes this a theatrical explosion not to be missed. Those who might become distraught watching what unfolds are excused, though, because this is a rough, difficult, physically and psychologically distressing exhibition of dramatic art.
There is no grisly murder depicted on the stage, with no actual violence or torture on view. But a compelling theater maker can make a description of such events far more grueling than a demonstration of overly realistic stage-fight choreography. The words delivered here—being violent, unfiltered, and too unbelievable to be untrue—are viscerally wrenching. This is one of those plays where you don’t feel comfortable presenting details to prospective viewers, except it is in many ways too potentially difficult—think gut-wrenching—to send folks in unawares.
The Dana H. of the title is Dana Higginbotham, the mother of playwright Hnath. (While it is suggested that mother and son are now reasonably close, this was apparently not the sort of family where you’d want to drop by, year after year, for Thanksgiving dinner.) Higginbotham—a nondenominational chaplain working in hospitals and hospices—was in 1997 abducted by a white supremacist ex-con and held hostage for what turned out to be five months, carted around the Florida/Carolina corridor through a circle of hatred and violence. (The few law enforcement officials she was able to try to escape to simply nodded and winked at the behavior of the good old boy who was her captor—or, more likely, were scared off by his hand-made tats and ultra-violent circle of domestic-terrorist friends.)
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Higginbotham survived, or there would be no play; at least, not in this form. Several years back she finally began to talk about her ordeal, and she suggested that her son—who over the last five years has developed into one of our more perceptive playwrights, with The Christians and A Doll’s House, Part 2 among his steadily increasing catalog—dramatize her story. (These events occurred while he was in his freshman year at NYU; his mother shielded him from her ordeal while it was underway, fearing the long reach of her evil captor and his widespread circle of excon “brothers.”)
Hnath—presumably and understandably not eager to hear his mother’s tale of rape and torture in person—enlisted his colleague Steve Cosson, artistic director of The Civilians, to record a series of interviews. Rather than adapt the tapes into a play, Hnath perceptively realized that it wasn’t just Higginbotham’s words that were on the tape; her breathing, her pauses, the tone of her voice were all so dramatic that he seems to have realized that you couldn’t possibly replicate them more effectively.
Working with his long-time director Les Waters and with highly perceptive sound designer Mikhail Fiksel, Hnath has sculpted Dana H. directly from the tapes, albeit highly and artfully edited. The voice we hear over the course of the evening is, in fact, that of Higginbotham; the altogether phenomenal O’Connell lip syncs the entire text. (We also hear Cosson as the unseen questioner, giving the play something of a documentary feel.)
You might think—as this viewer did, until a couple of minutes in—that a lip-synced performance is something of a stunt, only half so valid as a full performance. Under these particular circumstances, though, O’Connell’s performance is nothing less than a powerful and unprecedented work of art. She knows the text intimately, of course; she couldn’t otherwise match the tape. (She sits in a hotel room easy chair for most of the performance, plugged into a set of earbuds which presumably help keep her on pace with the soundtrack.)
What we get is something considerably more than just a performance. The freedom from actually speaking and projecting the lines allows O’Connell to act Higginbotham’s ordeal, in almost real time; not only the words, but every gulp, pause and breath of air. We see none of the violence onstage, no; but we see it all in her eyes, including the terror, and get a rounded understanding of how Higginbotham was ultimately able to emerge from her ordeal.
The performance from O’Connell—a nonfamous but familiar actor with a long history on stage, screen, and television, including an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence—is so ingrained in the play that you can’t, and wouldn’t want to, imagine it without her. Dana H. is not the best play of the season, no, nor perhaps of the spring. But it is one of a kind, and then some. Anyone interested in acting or the power of live theater will need to sit in on this heart-stopping 70 minutes.
Dana H. opened February 25, 2020, at the Vineyard Theater and runs through April 11. Tickets and information: vineyardtheatre.org
