Playhouse Tuesdays: Rabbit Hole

by erica wachs, prose reader

I… I missed a week, didn’t I? I apologize, I skipped a week for midterms and the whole cycle got thrown off. Anyway, hello! I’m back! I apologize for the oversight—however with the nightmarish weeks I’ve just lived through, I doubt anyone would want to read the angsty blog post I inevitably would have written. To make up for this, I’ll attach a picture of me acting in the show I was just in last weekend (I wrote a blog post on it, The Trouble with Summer People earlier in the year), one, to fulfill some minor vanity/internet celebrity dreams, and two, so you can actually see a play I’ve written about being onstage—even if it’s just a still picture.

Anyway… the play I’ve chosen this week is Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire:

“Yes, Rabbit Hole is a play about a bereaved family, but that does not mean they go through the day glazed over, on the verge of tears, morose or inconsolable. That would be a torturous and very uninteresting play to sit through. The characters are, instead, highly functional, unsentimental, spirited, and often funny people who are trying to maneuver their way through their grief and around each other as best they can… Rabbit Hole is not a tidy play. Resist smoothing out its edges.”

I’m going to do something I haven’t quite done before on this blog. I’m going to critique a play. I know that’s not technically the point of what I’m trying to do; so far I’ve taken the very optimistic “here are things I like about this play, appreciate them with me” route. And, yes, most of that stems from the fact that the plays I read are either given to me by people who know me, or plays that I’ve heard about and felt the need to read. Rabbit Hole was on my list for a while; I saw a scene performed about a year ago and have wanted to read it since then. And let me preface my critique by stating that it’s a Pulitzer Prize winning show, so clearly it has a lot of merit. (In other words, I’m a nineteen-year-old amateur, what do I know?) And while we’re on the subject of disclaimers, I also have never suffered the grief mentioned in this play, which could be where some of the dislike stems from. I also don’t have kids. In short, the play tells the story of Becca and her husband Howie, who are coping with the death of their four-year-old son Danny, who was killed in a car crash by a teenager named Jason. As the play opens, Becca’s incompetent sister Izzy informs Becca that she’s pregnant. At some point in the play, Becca’s mom Nat shows up. For practically no reason. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s it. That’s the plot. Becca and Howie try to sell the house. They try to get over Danny. They don’t. You heard Lindsay-Abaire. It’s not a tidy play.

And yet it was. I think what bothered me most about the show was that every scene had to make a point about a different aspect of grief, or, more specifically, how Becca wasn’t coping well. The scenes would turn from an innocent birthday party to an explosion of “how dare you”s and “I can’t believe you would do that!” or “I’m trying to get over him!” No one really was trying. And then, instead of clean one-liners to end every scene, these moments of tension would end with a “We all miss him.” “Yeah… I know,” followed by a dramatic fadeout of lights. They were all self-contained in the sense that there wasn’t a plot of the show, so every scene, in effect, became a microcosm of plot. They talk about selling the house. That’s a scene. They have an open house; it doesn’t go too well. That’s another scene. Or maybe they do (we don’t ultimately know). All the scenes circle back to Danny. And, well, yes, these kinds of endings are understandable when the show is telling that kind of story. But I don’t think these moments are the type of story the playwright wanted to tell. And that’s primarily the incongruity I’m critiquing. The people Lindsay-Abaire describes in his author’s note at the end sound dynamic. They sound engaging, and funny; they sound like they live lives. They’re different from the characters he writes. Becca goes to the grocery store. It reminds her of Danny. Do you understand what I’m saying? Her recounting of the grocery store is harrowing, and beautifully written. But it loses its effect after it’s the tenth time in the show she’s been set off in this particular way.

This leads me to the other aspect of the show that I didn’t particularly enjoy. I didn’t, or couldn’t, rather, appreciate how—soap opera—the family was. Becca and Howie have a dead son. Becca’s mom Nat also has a dead son, Arthur. It doesn’t even occur to Becca to compare Arthur and Danny; in fact, she discourages her mother from doing so. Howie can’t get Becca to sleep with him. Izzy accuses Howie of having an affair, and nothing comes of that. Izzy’s pregnant, and that annoys Becca in an unexplained-yet-very-obvious way. Jason, who accidentally killed Danny, also has a dead father. In order to make the grief plausible, the situations of these people have to be a little more believable. Otherwise, we’re lost in a sea of depression. How much more can this family take? Lindsay-Abaire tries to depict regular people, but if I knew a family like this, I’d round them up and place them in therapy myself. These mini-dramas are the inconsistencies that don’t get “cleaned up” at the end of the play, when the final lights fade on a gasping Becca and Howie. But Lindsay-Abaire doesn’t earn these loose ends. And yes, that is life. Things don’t get resolved in one month, or eight, or ten. People grieve for long, unexplained periods of time. Death is hard. We get that. But that’s also a bit… well, stagnant. Maybe, if the audience got a glimpse of some sort of character beyond the grief, a plot behind the death, a resolution behind the veil of hyper-dramatic cliffhangers, I would have appreciated the hope Becca expresses in act two: that “somewhere out there, I’m having a good time.”

#playhousetuesdays #ericawachs