Playwright: David Harrower. At: Victory Gardens Theatre at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln. Phone: 773-871-3000; $30-$58. Runs through: Aug. 9. Photo courtesy of Victory Gardens Theatre
When they hear the words "child abuse," most people immediately envision the most repugnant atrocities their imaginations are capable of conjuring. David Harrower's microscopic exploration of a single incident and its two conspirators, their crimes classified within that label more by default than by definition, delves beneath the legal boundaries of their experience to expose complexities as varied as human individuality.
Fifteen years before the start of our play, shy, socially inept Ray was invited to a picnic, where he met the host's daughter Una, an assertive young lady of "suspiciously adult yearnings" in need of comforting after a quarrel with her chum. This ill-starred encounter between the two misfits led to a brief, but intensely romantic, relationship. And now, following a breakup with her current boyfriend, Una has sought out her former sweetie, who has since moved on with his life. What keeps this premise from emerging the sentimental reunion we might expect is that Una is 27 years old and Ray is 55meaning that their passionate fling occurred when he was 40 and she was 12.
Did your brain abruptly slam its doors shut when you read that? Does all your social conditioning tell you that Ray must be a wicked, calculating predator and Una a helpless, compliant baby? Have you never, yourself, met astonishingly mature teenagers or pathetically gullible grown-ups? Yes, these age-crossed lovers exhibited extremely poor judgment, rendering them subject to interference from misapprehending outsidersbut they are not the stereotypical villain and victim of pop-science tabloids, and our dramatic question, not what happened in the past, but whether these scarred survivorsboth of themare doomed to repeat their earlier mistakes.
Audiences with intellects not immobilized by dogma may see hints of Oleanna or The Night Porter in this 80-minute confrontation, for there's no denying the fundamental artifice of the plot's progress. Under Dennis Zacek's direction, however, William L. Petersen, in fine form after his Hollywood stint, delivers a performance of dignity and presence that engages our sympathies in spite of our inevitable prejudices. But while Mattie Hawkinson is the quintessence of doe-eyed damselhood in appearance and her text interpretation faultless, her too-narrowly circumscribed vocal rangein this case, that of a quasi-adolescent given to whining shrillness when frustratednudges us toward doubts as to precisely who is the more mentally unstable perpetrator of this folie à deux beyond the degree necessary to achieve the ambiguity that is the playwright's goal.