I’ve crumpled a few Kleenex in my day while watching films, or reading novels.
I needed therapy after seeing Sophie’s Choice, and practically downed a bottle of Tylenol from the pain in my brain at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic tale The Road.
And the floodgates still open every time I hear Cyndi Lauper’s song True Colors, and believe me, I have no idea why either.
Yes, I am a sap.
So when I went to see Powerhouse Theatre’s presentation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Rabbit Hole, I expected to be sobbing uncontrollably.
Like many people who hear the play’s premise –– about how a family deals with the death of their four-year-old boy –– I was pretty sure I was going to lose it by the first scene. But I ended up laughing, a few times, and not from discomfort.
Rabbit Hole is not a pathos-ridden story of last regrets, and feeling sorry for oneself, it’s about how different personalities cope with loss, and it’s one of the most humanistic, real stories I’ve seen in a long time.
The beauty of the play is how it builds up tension through simple tasks, and very talkative conversation (and a few F-bombs, for those sensitive to that.) People we never meet or see are discussed, TVs are turned on, laundry is folded, and lots of delicious looking baking is consumed, just as if we were peering into this family’s window and watching as life unfolds.
At the centre of the story is mother Becca (played admirably by Katja Burnett). Her grief at losing her son, Danny, to a car accident is buried deep within her, but it surfaces every once a while, and not in the way you would expect.
She deals with things in her own way –– endless baking of sweet treats, depriving her husband of sexual relations for eight months, refusing to attend therapy group, badgering her sister for her wily ways, and banning the family dog from the house –– that help you understand her suffering without banging you over the head with it.
Then there’s her husband Howie (a subtle performance by Zyan Panagopolos) who is the complete opposite. He wears his grief on his sleeve every time he goes upstairs to Danny’s room –– still the way it was before he died –– to watch the video of him playing with the family dog.
He doesn’t want anything to change and balks when Becca insists on selling the house.
You see the fractures in their relationship that exist in many partnerships, even when the death of a child is not at the centre of the discourse.
Nothing ever bogs down in the depths of despair because of this “realness” and secondary characters also help to lighten the load.
There’s Izzy (in a great performance by newcomer Beckie Turner), Becca’s feisty sister, who gets into a bar fight and later informs everyone she is pregnant (hence the eating of all those tortes, crème caramels, etc.) Her scenes with Becca are just as poignant as the ones with Howie, making her a more sympathetic character than is first alluded.
Then there’s Nat (the perfectly cast Joanne Feenstra) whose wine consumption and loose lips often irritate her eldest daughter, especially when she compares the loss of her 30-year-old son, who died of a heroin overdose, to that of Becca’s loss.
We all know she means well, and the reconciliation between mother and daughter near the end of the play, again in its subtle way, is the most heartfelt.
Not to give too much away, but Rabbit Hole’s saddest scene comes when young Jason (the even younger seeming, and sweet Ross Freeman-Marsh) visits the family.
He’s the boy that was driving the car that killed Danny, when he swerved to miss the dog.
At first, he is not welcomed by Howie, when he walks in unexpected during an open house, but Becca later meets with him. His innocence is so credible, and Becca’s grief finally comes to the surface, that you’d be inhuman not to shed at least one tear.
Audiences should not be afraid to enter the Rabbit Hole. And they should see this play before grabbing the DVD of the film version, starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. There’s something about the immediacy of the stage that makes this story fraught with emotion –– both happy and sad. And at least one hanky is required.
Rabbit Hole continues at Powerhouse Theatre today at 2 p.m., and Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are available at the Ticket Seller box office, 549-7469, www.ticketseller.ca.
–– Kristin Froneman is the Arts and Entertainment editor at The Morning Star.
