What if I told you that the best acting on Broadway is coming from a woman who doesn’t utter a single word?
As you might have heard, in Lucas Hnath’s Dana H.—now on Broadway after runs in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York at off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre—the dynamite Deirdre O’Connell lip-syncs every bit of dialogue. In another ingenious turn, that dialogue itself is cut together from multiple 2015 interviews between Hnath’s mother, Dana Higginbotham, and Steve Cosson, artistic director of The Civilians.
While Hnath is an acclaimed playwright—his works include Hillary and Clinton, the Tony-nominated A Doll’s House, Part 2, and The Christians—he was smart to use those recorded interviews; Dana H. wouldn’t be as powerful if not for its documentary-style script (not unlike Is This A Room, which is running in repertory with Dana H. at the Lyceum).
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
There’s no artifice or theatrical wizardry on display here: Before O’Connell begins speaking, we see a stagehand fit her with wired earbuds; she’s hearing Dana’s voice just as we are. Beeps alert us to cuts and splices in the recorded interviews. And occasionally we hear Cosson prodding her along as she recalls a horrific five-month stretch in 1998 in which she was abducted, beaten, and terrorized by a mentally disturbed ex-convict.
Dana is a hospice chaplain with a calming voice and palliative demeanor. “I have been present at the point of death at the very moment of death and the average is about 3 or 4 times a week for 20 years,” she says, “so multiply that.” She was a chaplain in a psych ward when she met Jim (“…he was just a very intimidating character to look at”). She counseled him; he came to her Bible study. And when he was released, she took him for a meal, gave him shelter during Christmas (“I remember him sharpening the pen…to make a weapon”), and helped him find an apartment.
Dana describes the ensuing disturbing litany of events with an almost journalistic detachment. She mentions “carrying out jobs, hits”; purchasing a gun at a pawn shop; buying bomb-making supplies at Walmart. “He’s got his hand on my neck the whole time,” she recalls, “almost everywhere we were his hand was always on my neck.”
It’s hard for her to remember all the details—the exact timeline. Dana frequently thumbs through a thick manuscript, something she wrote in 2013. Or is it hard for her to tell us the details, and does she just need a bit of a breather now and then? Because they certainly are difficult to hear.
And I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t she run away? Call the cops? Reader, she did! Of course she did! She’s black and blue all over, and the police come back with: “You know it’s just your word against his.” And: “We can keep him for maybe 48 hours maybe 72 we’re not sure but that’s all we can do.” As she later explains: “Every encounter ended with him and the cop over there chatting and pats on the backs and smiles and off he went. Leading him right back to me so that I was never able to uh fully escape.”
Still, the most astonishing part about Dana H. is its utter lack of bitterness and rage. She does allow herself one moment of sarcasm—“Oh, ok, my favorite part”—before reciting, very quickly, the details of perhaps the most violent, damaging moment of the entire experience. Then again, this is a woman who stares death in the face for a living. It’s not surprising that what we hear in Dana’s voice, more than anything else, is strength.
Dana H. opened October 17, 2021, at the Lyceum Theatre and runs through November 28. Tickets and information: thelyceumplays.com
