Playwright: David Lindsay-Abaire
At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn
Phone: 312-443-3800; $20-$68
Runs through: April 15
By Catey Sullivan
Mundane chasms—gulfs of unbearable heartbreak made all the more wrenching by their workaday ordinariness—loom throughout Rabbit Hole. The considerable impact of David Lindsay-Abaire's script doesn't come from showy emotional pyrotechnics. It comes from a far more authentic place, from the quiet desolation of two people managing to function—doing the laundry, going to work, remembering birthdays—from inside a terrifying abyss.
This is an unflinching story of the sort of capricious brutality that swallows lives whole and leaves people invariably, profoundly alone, adrift in everyday routines that are suddenly, senselessly defined by gulfs of isolation, pain and rage. When their four-year-old son is killed running into the street after his dog, comfortably established middle-class suburbanites Howie ( Daniel Cantor ) and Becca ( Lia D. Mortensen ) are thrust into the purgatory of boundless grief. They're unable to help each other cope as the most commonplace things—pictures taped to a refrigerator door, trips to the grocery store—become minefields of inconsolable sorrow.
'I can't do this. It's too hard,' Howie informs his wife at one point in a voice as final as death. It's the tone of somebody who has simply used up all his resources—the flatline, affectless timbre of somebody who, at least for the moment, is just too exhausted to care anymore.
Credit director Steve Scott for coaxing performances of subtlety and truth from a cast that doesn't hit a false note. When Becca tells Howie, 'It sucks that we can't be there for each other right now. But that's just the way it is,' it's with a defeated shrug and a sense of quiet, bone-deep defeat.
But amidst the sorrow, Rabbit Hole is—remarkably—slivered through with humor. There's a trenchant wit at work here, and from the aching struggles of Becca and Howie, it flashes like a shard of a mirror turned toward sunlight.
Much of it comes from Amy Warren as Izzy, Becca's free-wheeling, borderline train wreck of a sister. Warren's performance is both flamboyant—which is entirely appropriate, as this is a character that rocks hot-pink hair extensions and manages to get fired from Cracker Barrel—and deceptively layered. Izzy's not the stereotypical party girl her lifestyle initially indicates. Little by little, Warren reveals Izzy's true, unexpectedly level-headed colors.
As Becca and Howie, Mortensen and Cantor are utterly believable in restrained and, therefore, all the more powerful performances while Mary Ann Thebus, as the kind of mother who capable of driving her children crazy even after they're grown, is marvelous.
Abaire ties things up a little too neatly at the end, as all manner of conflicts and hurts are smoothed over in the course of a facile conversation. Up until that point, Rabbit Hole is all-engulfing.