One of the worst things about any big trouble is the way it isolates us at the precise moment we're most in need of comfort.
It matters not one whit if the people sharing our dinner table or office cubicle are going through the identical crisis, because no two traumas are exactly the same. Every loss, every grief is as individual and specifically coded as a set of fingerprints.
That's one of the main insights to be gleaned from David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama. A production running at the Olney Theatre Center is alternately harrowing, hilarious and hopeful.
FOR THE RECORD - A theater review in Wednesday's Today section misidentified one of the actors staring in Rabbit Hole, now playing at Olney Theatre Center. His name is Aaron Bliden.
The Sun regrets the errors.
In the play, an upscale suburban couple are devastated when their 4-year-old son and only child is killed in a traffic accident. It quickly becomes clear that Howie and Becca not only have different styles of mourning, but that their efforts to seek solace are diametrically opposed.
Becca (played with fierce fragility by Deborah Hazlett) seeks to erase all reminders of the boy so that she might, however momentarily, escape her unbearable pain. Howie (the affable Paul Morella) replays old home videos and compulsively discusses his loss with aghast strangers.
Other people grappling with the boy's death include Becca's feckless, pregnant younger sister, Izzy; her motormouth mother, Nat, who herself has outlived one of her children; and Jason, the teenage boy who was behind the wheel of the car.
The play is quite profound and wise in the way it explores the mechanisms of grief, from relatives who perversely cling to their guilt (because that implies the accident could have been prevented) to the bizarre hierarchies some mourners strive to erect.
At one point, Becca implies that the loss of her son is somehow a greater tragedy and more deserving of sympathy than was the suicide of Becca's 30-year-old drug-addicted brother - as if grief could be calibrated by a previously determined set of parameters.
In his directorial debut, Mitchell Hebert apparently hired the most skilled actors available, regardless of whether they precisely fit the script. For instance, Hazlett and Morella appear to be well into their 40s - arguably too old to have a son as young as Danny, unless the boy was adopted. Likewise, Kate Kiley, in the role of Becca's rambunctious mother, seems to be the same generation as her daughter.
Still, when you have actors this committed and brave, why cast anyone else?
