Rabbit Hole--a Review

Playing in Ashland, OR this Spring, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is David Lindsay-Abaire's 2006 work Rabbit Hole, the story of how a handful of people (parents, mother-in-law, aunt and youthful driver of car that killed Danny) try to deal with the death of Danny, the four year-old son of Becca and Howie, when he darted out in front of an oncoming car driven by a local teen and was killed. Though the "action" of the play takes place eight to ten months after loss, parental grief seems as fresh as if the accident had just happened. I think, however, that rather than being an effective exploration of the nature of grief in the face of loss, the play had a few potent scenes and then lost its way. The NY Times critic raved over the piece, but this review is a little closer to the mark.

Lindsay-Abaire's three principal faults are his unrealistic handling of lingering grief, his decision not to portray the awkwardness of friendship in the face of grief and his attempt to "lighten" a leaden-paced piece by leavening it with humor of a ditzy sister and insensitive mother-in-law. That is, the humor seemed a bit contrived, as if Lindsay-Abaire was aware of the lugubrious pace of his piece and decided that he had to "lighten" it a bit. But the overall effect is of a work that doesn't lack promise but is forced to cover the same ground over and over again because of the constricted world that Lindsay-Abaire has drawn for his characters, Robin Goodrin Nordli as Becca, Bill Geisslinger as her husband Howie, Tyler Lawton as the irresponsible sister Izzy and Dee Maaske as the intrusive and overbearing mother-in-law Nat.

And, the crowd's ovation may have been a bit of a "sympathy ovation." After all, the subject of grief at the loss of a child is too hot for almost any of us to "handle." As Job said to his friends when they childed him during his own grief, "You see my calamity and are afraid." I think we saw a "calamity" before us that was as bad as our worse nightmares about our children, and then applauded because we were grateful it wasn't us.

Let's explore the play's inadequacies. The Net has many reviews that will tell you the good things.

Portraying Grief

Since grief is, like our fingerprints, unique to each one of us, how can one say that he hasn't portrayed grief "realistically?" Surely the ways that Becca "copes," by keeping little Danny's room like it was, by carefully washing and folding his clothes, by not attending support groups because she is alone in her island of grief, is familiar behavior. Surely Howie's keeping the video of little Danny at play and furtively watching it late at night is understandable behavior. We even are affected by the way that the two of them in their grief misfire in conversation, accusing each other of not cherishing Danny's memory as carefully as the other. But what isn't done so well is to understand grief not simply as a kind of continuous low-grade headache but as a series of waves that upset the life. That is, the thing that gave the play its rather claustrophobic feeling was the fact that one felt that little Danny had to be the spoken or unspoken focus of every conversation or action in the play. While that may be true at some level, in that the consciousness of losing a child never fully dims, it can be played out much more poignantly by showing that grief would be interwoven into the fabric or texture of continuing life. In that continuing life, then, grief returns like an unbidden guest at strange and inopportune moments. Little and unexpected things trigger it. The parent goes from "controlled" adult to a pool of uncontrolled emotion in a moment of time. That is how grief would effectively be portrayed. That each parent had his "explosion" of tears in separate instances does not really answer my point; indeed, those outbursts were in "predictable" scenes. Maybe that is really my first point; Lindsay-Abaire has reduced grief to a predictable sadness.

Friends

What the author of the Book of Job realized 2500 or more years ago is that portraying grief's discussed context is just as important, if not more so, than portraying the loss itself. The author of Job set it up as a dialogue among "friends," a dialogue that goes horribly awry as each side retreats into its own world of blame, anger, grief, and judgmentalism. But what the conversational mode of the Book of Job does is to allow a fuller nuanced treatment of the various emotions attendant upon grief because people are able to pepper Job with different approaches to loss and God's justice in the world. In Rabbit Hole we only have the "intimate family" response to the loss. Thus, we are forced into an intellectual claustrophobia which could have been deepened by bringing in some friends. Perhaps one or two couples, whose names were mentioned in the script, should have been included. Show the way that they deal with Becca and Howie's grief. Rather than relentless, and rather boring, retelling of how Becca and Howie vainly "cope," why not show the dynamics of how friends are afraid, how they retreat, how they may try to reach out, how they judge? Bringing friends into the equation allows for multiplex nuance that Lindsay-Abaire didn't present.

Cheap Laughs

Finally, Lindsay-Abaire realizes that the unrelenting suffering of Howie and Becca must be supplemented by some lightness, lest the play itself collapse into a black hole. So, humor comes from insensitive mother-in-law or daft sister. We laugh nervously, however, because we realize that the lines are only inserted to try to give us a little bit of a mental break. Why not have the main characters be those with a sense of humor, who were trying to live their own complex lives after the loss? It would have affected us much more deeply had we thought that Howie and Becca were anything other than one-dimensional grief machines. But that, ultimately, is how they were portrayed. And because they were so uni-dimensional they had to remain in their world, a world that really didn't touch us. Maybe that, indeed, is why so many gave the play a standing ovation. At least we can keep this grief at bay. It was a collective sign of relief--a recognition that Howie and Becca's grief really won't haunt us....

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