Lucas Hnath, one of our more adventurous playwrights, has continually explored unconventional ways of storytelling. The Christians (2015) was written to be staged with five actors sitting on chairs backed by a vast church choir, surprising us when it devolved into a strikingly involving theological dispute between a pastor and his lieutenants. Red Speedo (2016) had its leading character swimming laps through a good part of the evening, with—again—sharp drama breaking out on the lip of the onstage pool. Little need be said about the astonishing A Doll’s House, Part 2 (2017), in which Hnath fashioned a fanciful sequel set in the period of Ibsen’s Part 1 but firmly aimed at today.
The playwright continues to test the bounds with The Thin Place, a decidedly unusual ghost story now at Playwrights Horizons (which also hosted The Christians). It almost seems like Hnath challenged himself, this time, to see just how minimalist a play he could devise. As one who has greatly admired and championed Hnath’s aforementioned works, I regret my inclination to consider The Thin Place something more like “The Thin Play.”
(In addition to the plays above, his résumé includes the less-than-indispensable Hillary and Clinton, which reached Broadway in 2019 but apparently dates back to 2008 and was first staged in 2014.)
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★ review here.]
The play has been directed by Les Waters, who—while staging an earlier play by Hnath—made a comment which the latter has developed into the present opus. Waters places the action on a bare stage, complete with fire safety panels on the back wall, which is set with only two armchairs. (At least some playgoers, noting theatrical wizard Mimi Lien credited as designer, might well sit through the 90 minutes awaiting some grand scenic effect.)
Hilda (Emily Cass McDonnell), an uncomfortable and unimposing young woman, enters. She sits on one of the chairs, holding her cup of tea, and talks. She tells of her long lost grandmother, describing how they would communicate without words, her grandmother psychically and not necessarily successfully transmitting random thoughts through the airwaves. (While playgoers are not so apprised, Hnath has dedicated this play to the late magician Ricky Jay.)
Hilda talks to audience members and then talks to Linda (Randy Danson), a professional medium who—as time goes on—suggests that so-called mediums are guided not by the supernatural but mostly by guessing. Hilda nevertheless pumps Linda for information about her grandmother, who disappeared from the house after a fight with Hilda’s mother, and about that sketchily problematic mother.
Over the course of the evening , Linda takes Hilda to a party—still sitting on those two armchairs—where we meet Linda’s friends Sylvia (Kelly McAndrew) and Jerry (Triney Sandoval). Eventually we come to a haunted house that is, well, haunted. Matters become exceedingly ghostly, with a couple of mildly shocking moments along the way. At the end, Hilda remains sitting alone in her armchair.
Perhaps there is more to The Thin Place than meets the eye, or at least this eye. I’ll give the playwright the benefit of the doubt; if his artistic imagination impelled him to this Thin Place, so be it. One can only look forward to where his flights of dramatic fancy send him next. Which, it so happens, is Dana H., a one-woman play about Hnath’s evangelist mother, which begins in February at the Vineyard. And which we shall look eagerly forward to.
The Thin Place opened Dec. 12, 2019, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through Jan. 5, 2020. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
