"Blackbird' by Theatre Exile (3rd review)

David Harrower's Blackbird is essentially a two-character play in a single unbroken act of 80 minutes, conditions that put a great deal of work on the actors and no little burden on the script. The Greeks pulled the same thing off without breaking a sweat, but the setup on a modern stage is a little different— no noble kings and grieving queens, no sage chorus for advice, no deus ex machina to make things right at the end. All we have is the fragile, post-Freudian ego, easily broken and never quite mended.

In Blackbird, the egos are very frail indeed. Ray (Pearce Bunting) is a recovering child molester who is trying to put his life back together after doing jail time. He's married an age-appropriate woman (who does have an underage daughter), and found himself what he describes as a responsible position, although we never learn what he does or for whom, and the workplace in which the play's action proceeds is a cafeteria teeming with garbage. Una (Julianna Zinkel) is his victim, now grown and come back to confront him.

Could a 12-year-old seduce a grown man?

Harrower tries to build suspense in the Pinteresque first scene as Una, who refuses to reveal her identity, aggressively corners Ray, who either does not recognize or refuses to acknowledge her. There's much stammering, fragmented dialogue as the two size each other up, and heavy blocking as Ray tries to keep his distance.

When the relationship is at last revealed, we segue into a middle section in which each protagonist tells his version of the story. Is it possible, as Ray insists, that a 12-year-old girl, however precocious, could have seduced a 40-year-old man against his will? (Humbert Humbert would have his own answer for that.) Is Una responsible in any morally culpable way for reaching out to a man old enough to be her father in the confusion of her nascent sexuality?

A world of human hurt

Harrower provides no easy answers to these questions, but what is clear is that his protagonists' encounter, shattering to them both, is unresolved and irresolvable. The play's climax likewise settles nothing, and the (uncredited) appearance of Ray's stepdaughter seems more a device to ring the curtain down than to provide real dramatic closure.

Pearce Bunting's Ray develops slowly but affectingly after the awkward opening scene, and Julianna Zinkel is extraordinary as the deeply damaged Una who, part stalker and part suppliant, can only revisit her trauma again and again. Blackbird is flawed as drama, but its best pages contain a world of human hurt, and a salient reminder that in matters of the heart the rules that apply are written anew by each pair of lovers.



To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
For a further discussion by SaraKay Smullens, clicki here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.