He’s bruised and broken, she’s spiky and defensive. You might say that Danny (Christopher Abbott) and Roberta (Aubrey Plaza)—the hard-luck heroes of John Patrick Shanley’s 1983 Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, now at off-Broadway’s Lucille Lortel—were made for each other…if they were made for anyone at all.
They’re not exactly on the prowl. She’s playing with a bowl of pretzels; hunched over, back turned, everything about her body language says “leave me the F alone.” He looks like he’s about to jump out of his skin, or throw a punch (“Guys bother me, I start swinging,” he shrugs). “When I turn thirty I’m gonna put a gun in my mouth and blow my fuckin head off,” Danny declares. Without missing a beat, Roberta replies, “Do it in the bathroom. It’s easier to clean up.” She fantasizes about killing her father (“If I thought I wouldn’t get in bad trouble I’d take a big knife and stab him in the face about fifty times”); he thinks he beat a guy to death last night. “Everybody makes me mad. That’s why I don’t ever talk to nobody,” he says.
Still, they’re the only two people in a dingy wood-paneled Bronx bar on a winter night, so after ripping open and rubbing salt in each other’s emotional wounds—and getting a little violent (they both dish it out)—they leave together. “I’m gonna take you home, baby,” says Roberta, who has possibly convinced herself that she can ease Danny’s pain.
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
If you only know Shanley’s later plays—e.g., 2004’s provocative Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Doubt, or 1993’s scathing Hollywood satire Four Dogs and a Bone—Danny, one of his earliest, might surprise you: It’s less a drama than a character study; there’s a reason acting students and auditioners obsess over the monologues. But it’s vintage Shanley: big talk, big emotion, and big dreams. People who crave love as much as they crave pain. Everything is almost operatic with Danny and Roberta. (You can certainly see how he went from Danny to the 1987 rom-com Moonstruck, for which he won a best original screenplay Oscar.)
And they’re tough roles—ones that require an actor to go from “fuck off” to “marry me” in the span of 80 minutes (another reason aspiring actors love them). As the truck driver who bears the nickname The Beast, Abbott is fearless—by turns dynamic and devastating, imposing but not terrifying, poignant but never pathetic. In her stage debut as divorcée Roberta, film and TV actress Plaza—whose deadpan delivery and dagger-filled glares proved a highlight of the Sicily-set second season of The White Lotus—tends to fall into a familiar cadence with Roberta’s lines, wilting under the weight of the Noo Yawk accent. She’s more comfortable with lighter one-liners like “You got friendly ears,” one of the awkwardly sweet compliments Roberta gives Danny.
There’s one element to actor-turned-director Tony Ward’s production that will likely prove divisive: the choreography. The subtitle of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (though it’s not printed on the cover or the title page) is “An Apache Dance.” Ward has taken that literally, enlisting co–movement directors Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber to create a passionate, highly physical pas de deux for Abbott and Plaza. (It also masks a big scene change.) Originating in the early 1900s, the apache dance, pronounced ah-PAHSH, came out of the French underworld, a sort of two-person battle for supremacy. Think dips, drags, flips, death drops—the Argentine tango–meets–MMA. You’ll either love it or hate it. I fall squarely into the love camp. After all, it’s a fight that leads to sex, and what could be more appropriate for Danny and Roberta?
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea opened Nov. 13, 2023, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre and runs through Jan. 7, 2024. Tickets and information: dannyandthedeepbluesea.com
