In a nondescript office building, a man ushers a woman into a break room. The woman is 27-year-old Una, and the man is Ray. He is now 56 years old, and when he was 40, he had a sexual relationship with a then 12-year-old Una.
Now, 15 years after their attempt to run away together ended with Ray getting arrested and spending three years and seven months in prison, Una shows up at his workplace unannounced. She spotted his photo in a trade magazine and made the six-to-seven-hour drive to see him. Fifteen years on, Ray holds a stable job, is in a committed relationship, and even has a new name – Peter. And he has a question for Una:
“What did you come here for?”
So begins Scottish playwright David Harrower’s Blackbird, now playing at the MATCH courtesy of Dirt Dogs Theatre Co.
Blackbird is a postmortem of sorts, a brutal, real-time dissection of what happened between Ray and Una 15 years earlier, filtered though it is through the dodginess of memory and the shadows of coping mechanisms – denial, dissociation, cognitive dissonance. Harrower doesn’t play coy with how Ray and Una know each other. But the gut punch of the play isn’t in the reveal of prurient details (though they are uncomfortably present). It’s in Una’s excruciating trek across a devasted emotional landscape, scorched by her relationship with Ray. It’s in the trauma, laid bare within one of those office buildings with “cars parked outside” and “no idea what’s happening inside.”
Harrower’s play, which was commissioned for the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005, is about sexual abuse and its aftermath, which is often framed by its characters as love, and it’s about as psychologically messy as a playwright would dare be about such a subject. (Not for nothing, the first word spoken in the play is “shock,” and it would be hard to argue that Harrower isn’t, at least in part, aiming to do just that.) It’s confrontational, demanding that its viewers acknowledge the complexity of some of the most difficult of human emotions, like guilt, desire, shame, and self-preservation.
It makes for a taut 90 minutes with no intermission, which Director Malinda L. Beckham approaches with a sensitive yet unflinching eye. Her grasp on the material is firm and her direction is clear-eyed, ensuring the only mess we see in sharp focus is within each character’s psyche, metaphorically represented by the trashed-up, corner-set break room, designed by Mark A. Lewis with set decoration by Beckham. Lewis also served as the production’s lighting designer, with choices that added a sense of drama and claustrophobia at turns.
Olivia Knight and Kevin Daugherty star in Dirt Dogs Theatre Co.’s production of David Harrower’s Blackbird.
Photo by Gary Griffin
Harrower’s dialogue is fragmented, littered with short sentences, half-completed thoughts, and self-interruptions. It’s challenging to pull off – particularly so within the minimalist, unforgiving soundscape crafted by Sound Design Trevor B. Cone – and it takes a bit for the actors to settle into its cadence and find its rhythms. But once Olivia Knight and Kevin Daugherty do, it’s hard to imagine finding more nuanced, and brave, performances anywhere on a stage.
Like Ray, we wonder just what Una is looking for by visiting Ray. Is it to force him to acknowledge the damage he did and find closure? Maybe demand an apology or seek revenge? Find out if he still wants her? It’s unclear if Una knows exactly what she wants when she walks into the break room, and Knight embodies that ambiguity perfectly. She’s unpredictable and it’s riveting, keeping Ray and the audience on their toes. Knight’s Una projects a put-on toughness that can’t completely mask how vulnerable she is, how close her emotions are to the surface. It’s further highlighted by the long, feminine dress she wears paired with leather – leather jacket, leather boots, leather bag – all thoughtful costuming choices by Beckham.
Early in the play, Ray refers to Una as “some kind of ghost,” and she agrees. But it isn’t until Knight’s staggering delivery of a behemoth of a monologue, where the specter of her 12-year-old self manifests before our eyes and her 27-year-old self wavers, that we can fully appreciate it. In that moment, we can feel the unbearable weight of the trauma she’s carried into the room.
Opposite Knight is Daugherty as Ray, and the character is its own curiosity. Daugherty plays him as relatively soft-spoken, end-of-the-workday rumpled, and seemingly harmless, but very clearly trying to protect himself. Ray is defensive. “I don’t have to be in here with you,” he says soon after the two arrive in the break room. He is stressed and suspicious. But also, almost wistful at times. It’s wholly unsettling.
To be clear, he is not a sympathetic character. Alarm bells go off repeatedly, such as when he tries to get Una to agree that he was never one of “those sick bastards” or when he tells her that, as a 12-year-old, “You knew what you wanted.” He is constantly calculating, and yet palpably regretful – though for what exactly, it’s tough to say.
Harrower resists black-and-white morality, which can make a show like Blackbird tough to process, make it feel like something you want to recoil from. But it’s this very discomfort, and its refusal to offer any kind of catharsis, that makes you think it’s doing something right. It’s raw and challenging, and this production, just like Una, demands not just to be seen or heard, but to be reckoned with.
Performances of Blackbird will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Monday, March 3, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays through March 8 at the MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, visit dirtdogstheatre.org or call 713-521-4533. $30 (with pay-what-you-can shows on Sunday and Monday).
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