Going Grieving Down the Rabbit Hole at ReAct Theatre
Kelly Hyde as Becca and Gordon Hendrickson as Howie in David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole at ReAct Theatre (Photo: David Hsieh)
We thought of that twist of audience expectation while watching David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole at ReAct Theatre (at Hugo House through May 31, tickets: general $12 advance/$15 at the door). Becca and Howie Corbett are a golden couple, with a house in Connecticut. Howie works at a brokerage "in the City." These things matter because they underscore the nightmarish shock of accident--it can happen to anyone, at any time, even to someone who works in risk management.
Yet director and production designer David Hsieh sees Becca as an Issaquah mom, and Howie looks like he reports to work at Redmond. While that choice defuses some of the play's energy, which is derived from the topsy-turviness of grief's derangement, it also means these characters are believable as next-door neighbors--someone you might know.
As the play opens, Becca (Kelly Hyde) and Howie (Gordon Hendrickson) are eight months into the aftermath of the car accident that killed their four-year-old son. Hyde plays Becca as clinging compulsively to the normal, acting "level-headed" while she jettisons anything that provokes an emotional memory. In contrast, Hendrickson's Howie gives the impression he's dutifully "working through" the loss of his son, looking for mile-markers that might let him know how far he's come, and when this will all be over.
Both realize things will never be the same again, but they can't help but try to put the pieces back together. Becca's need for control--to keep her grief safe in the yard--extends both to her refusal of support-group comfort; to her older-sister condescension to Izzy (Ellen Dessler), the brassy, family screw-up, recently fired from Applebee's; and to their mother Nat (Walayn Sharples), who can't resist telling gnomic parables about the Kennedy curse.
That Jason Willette (Alex Adisorn), the teen driver, wants to apologize in person is something like a hand grenade being tossed into a room full of people holding sticks of sweaty dynamite. He's too clearly Lindsay-Abaire's grenade, and so Adisorn has the lone unpersuasive role in the ensemble. (Lindsay-Abaire even has him read a letter out loud. Oof.)
It's easy to enjoy the cast--you meet the family at their most fragile point, so unable to keep it together that they're reduced to a caricature of miscommunication, but then you gradually get to know (or guess at) the vibrant personalities so distorted by grief and stress. But that still leaves the question of why to go see a play that, for all its brusque, mordant humor, has such sadness at its heart.
For us, the reason came as Nat and Becca are packing up boxes, and Nat tries once again with a story, the kind that grandmothers love to repeat. She loves telling it, like she loved the boy, and it is a small triumph that she's won, to have kept the memory happy. Then she sighs the way people do when they come back to themselves.
