“The thin place” is a spot where it’s easy to cross between the world as we know it and another world, author Lucas Hnath explains in a program note (alongside what must be the glammest playwright headshot since Richard Avedon draped Marilyn Monroe over Arthur Miller). He credits the term to director Les Waters, who mentioned to him once that there were several in the town where Waters grew up. They’re places were, Walters told him, the lines between those worlds are thin.
The Thin Place, the kookily sincere 90-minute phantasmadrama that opened tonight in the upstairs Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, is written by Hnath and directed by Waters. It considers not so much both sides of such a place but both sides of those who encounter one: the believers and the nonbelievers, you might say, or the seekers and the nonseekers, or perhaps—as the play is sure to note—the marks and the con artists.
It’s an intriguing play, somewhat amusing, and it succeeds in its tricky outlandishness. It also aims for a profundity that it never quite achieves, in part because it is determined to keep its audience so off-balance.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★ review here.]
Superficially, The Thin Place is about two women. One is the youngish and seemingly prim Hilda (Emily Cass McDonnell), who has lost her grandmother and then her mother and wants to believe there are existences beyond our own, ways to communicate with those who are gone. The other is the older and more exotic Linda (Randy Danson, and the script calls her an Englishwoman though her accent seems island-ish), who makes her living as a medium but admits what she does is a trick.
Hilda walks onto a bare stage at the start, house lights still up, clutching a mug of tea. She sits on one of two mustard-yellow old-lady armchairs at center stage, and starts talking. The house lights stay up. McDonnell makes Hilda a compelling odd duck of a character; she appears to be blond and banally presentable, but as she talks she also seems a little off, with an unusual manner and soft, elongated vowels that make her seem either slightly European or slightly special needs. She tells stories of practicing telepathy with her grandmother, so they’d be able to communicate once grandma is dead. Their efforts never quite work.
Then Hilda introduces us to Linda, whose gatherings—you or I might call them seances—she’s begun attending. Danson takes the armchair next to McDonnell, and the two continue telling this story. The house lights are still up. There was clearly an attraction between the two, perhaps a romantic one, but also one based on Linda’s need for an audience and Hilda’s need to believe in something. Soon enough, Linda admits to her shtick, but she argues for its relevance anyway: Isn’t it important to let people hear from their lost loved ones what they want to hear? Isn’t closure, even fraudulent closure, worth something?
This is the philosophical crux of the play. What drives us to believe, and what drives us to be skeptics? Does belief have value, even when the thing believed in might not be real? This is an ongoing concern for Hnath, who grew up in an Evangelical church and asked it most directly in The Christians, about a megachurch pastor who begins to question his faith and asks his congregation to come along for that agnostic ride. The clever trick in The Thin Place is that the spiritualist doesn’t believe in the spiritual but does believe in her own charisma; it’s the meek seeker who is determined to believe in something bigger but also doesn’t quite believe in herself.
Hnath also likes playing with theatrical ideas—witness his very successful sequel to A Doll’s House—and he does that throughout The Thin Place. It’s interesting to see how the play moves from lengthy direct-address monologue into lengthy dialogue into a scene in which Hilda sits nearly silent as a party involving Linda, her cousin Jerry (Triney Sandoval), and her friend and perhaps ex Sylvia (Kelly McAndrew) transpires around her. Then Hnath and Waters play with our expectations a few more times, in ways I won’t spoil.
And yet while a theatergoer respects what Hnath and Waters are doing, one doesn’t always enjoy it. Stretches of the play drag, and Waters’ decision to keep the house lights up—which serves both, I think, to bring the audience into the playing space, to make us part of the seance, and also to deliver a fun coup de theatre near the end—makes for a viewing experience that is simply physically uncomfortable.
Ultimately, you’re not entirely sure if the point of the evening is existential debate or metatheatrical whimsy. There are spots, of course, where it’s easy to pass from one of those worlds to the other. But The Thin Place doesn’t quite land in one.
The Thin Place opened Dec. 12, 2019, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through Jan. 5, 2020. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
