The second presentation of Colonial Players' 60th anniversary season of plays celebrating love is David Lindsay-Abaire's 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Rabbit Hole, which takes an unflinching look at a couple coping with the accidental death of their 4-year-old son.
Rabbit Hole stirs the senses and is enlightening in its portrayal of family members - husband and wife and her sister and mother unable to help each other as they each work alone through grief. Moreover, Colonial Players introduces brilliant playwright Lindsay-Abaire, who infuses this work with an all-pervasive honesty in which his characters evoke empathy before the audience comes to understand them fully as family. Lindsay-Abaire's gift for lyrical, nuanced dialogue that is exactly right for each character is extraordinary. Through this dialogue, a family's despair, confusion, bungling and life-affirming laughter are on display along with their hope as they each learn to cope with the death of young Danny.
The audience becomes an instant eavesdropper witnessing a family's tragedy before being pulled into the drama to become part of a shared experience. This is a theater phenomenon that requires a gifted playwright, a skilled cast and director, and a home-like set. All of these conditions are in place at Colonial Players, and the intimate theater's in-the-round setting draws the audience in.
Here the set design of Barbra Colburn creates a believable family home that includes a living room with a TV, a dining area, a working kitchen, and a credible upstairs bedroom that will be cleared of a dead boy's things.
Conscious of this engrossing play's ability to transcend boundaries between actors and audiences, director Tom Newbrough succeeds at drawing the audience in to become involved with the emotions of "these human beings trying to cope and survive an extraordinary tragedy." He has gathered a cast of superb local actors.
The role of Becca - a former career woman who became a stay-at-home mother, later faced with redefining herself and her life - brought actress Cynthia Nixon the 2006 Tony award for best actress. In CP's production, this challenging role is eloquently played by Kris Valerio, who creates a fully dimensional portrait of an outwardly calm woman restraining her emotions and searching for logic in the death of her son eight months earlier. From the first scene where Valerio's Becca is sorting the clothes of a small child as she converses with her sister, the audience is drawn to her to shield her from the thoughtless remarks of well-meaning family members. Valerio gradually moves from a woman addicted to order, frustrated, angry and isolated in her grief to one who takes halting steps to rebuild a life that may involve moving to a house that holds no memories.
