There are moments in Sea Wall/A Life, the pair of monologues that just arrived on Broadway following a run at the Public Theater, where the silence can be deafening. This is particularly true in the first, Sea Wall, written by Simon Stephens, whose other works include Heisenberg and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Tom Sturridge has acted in two other Stephens plays, Punk Rock and Wastwater. Here he plays Alex, a young photographer utterly devoted to his wife, Helen, and their daughter, Lucy—to the point that he can seem awestruck simply describing the sight of Helen in a new dress, or Lucy asking her equally smitten grandfather to read to her. Alex invokes these treasures in a soft voice, at times seeming to hesitate between words, or grasp for them. The character is a sensitive soul, clearly, a man who seems easily overwhelmed; he cries frequently, he admits.
But there is more than a tendency towards heightened emotion underlying the fumbling, elliptical way Alex speaks, the painful pauses and sudden shifts that pepper his monologue. The character is trying to summon the courage to tell us something, something terrible, and by the time he does—in graphic detail—Sturridge’s exquisitely raw, delicate performance has so thoroughly captured our imagination and empathy that the revelation surpasses a gut punch, becoming a full blow to the heart. “There’s a hole running through the center of my stomach,” Alex says at one point, adding, “You can probably see it.” We can.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
Yet tragedy is not what defines Sea Wall, or A Life, penned by another acclaimed British playwright, Nick Payne (Constellations, If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet) and starring another film and stage star known to collaborate with him, Jake Gyllenhaal. Under the fierce, tender direction of Carrie Cracknell—also a Brit, who won praise here several years back for her London-based staging of A Doll’s House at BAM—the plays attest to our essential will to live and love, despite the challenges these pursuits continually throw at us.
Sea Wall and A Life share additional themes—death, parenthood, faith, all accompanied by their own obstacles—and though not initially intended to be staged together, there are uncanny parallels, down to the wording of certain lines. But they remain very much separate, each adhering to a distinct rhythm and sensibility. Were Gyllenhaal’s fast-talking, more patently neurotic Abe to meet Sturridge’s Alex in a bar, I’m not sure they’d readily strike up a conversation, much as they’d have to discuss. (They’re even lit differently; Guy Hoare’s design has Alex simply turn on a switch, where Abe fusses, eventually choosing a spotlight that leaves much of the stage dark.)
Abe, too, is father to a girl, or is about to be when A Life begins, with him recounting his wife revealing she’s pregnant, as he bastes a chicken. This juggling of the profound and the prosaic continues, as Abe, like Alex, veers between subjects, from that of impending fatherhood to the more sadly daunting matter of his own dad’s failing heart. But the transitions in A Life (also the title, incidentally, of a superb Adam Bock play, which offers a more probing look at mortality) can seem too rushed and cute, as if Payne were more interested in making a clever segue than digging into his character’s life-changing experiences, which actually occur some years apart.
Gyllenhaal deftly mines the humor in the more fundamentally comedic A Life, and, eventually, the pathos. As Alex frantically darts—at least in recollection—from his parents’ dining room to birthing classes, from the hospital where his father is dying to the one where his wife is in labor, the actor evokes the nerdy hysteria of a Woody Allen protagonist. While Alex devotes a fair amount of time to questioning God’s existence, then is driven to a sort of desperate hope, Abe finds himself mired in doubt after the most joyous of events—though we sense he’ll see his way out.
Cracknell wraps the production with a dramatic flourish that places both actors on Laura Jellinek’s stark, vast set—featuring a piano that Gyllenhaal’s Abe will play, in an elegiac touch—while keeping their characters apart. It’s a shame, as I suspect each could learn something from the other, but at least both are still searching and growing, both in spite of what they’ve been through and because of it.
Sea Wall/A Life opened August 8, 2019, at the Hudson Theatre and runs through September 29. Tickets and information: seawallalife.com
