"Rabbit Hole' at Olney Theatre

How atheists deal with loss

JIM RUTTER

I’m always annoyed when scientists try to ground religious concepts within a scientific framework. I’m thinking, for example, of Francis Crick's Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul and Roger Penrose's Shadows of the Mind, both ludicrous attempts to re-define the “soul” as consciousness. Richard Dawkins may validly contend that a “universe with a god” would be distinctly different empirically from “a universe without a god,” and thus the matter is subject to scientific inquiry. But once you buy into this logic, what inevitably follows is the subordination of science into religious frameworks. Instead of slaying the dragons of religious superstition, this process usually ends up breathing new life into them.

Often it’s not scientists but fiction writers—from Aldous Huxley to Michel Houellebecq— who take scientific appropriations of religious concepts and show their “fruitfulness” in human ethics and beliefs about life’s meaning. Such is the case with David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole, now receiving a nuanced, psychologically engaging production at the Olney Theatre Center.

Not that the characters in Lindsay-Abaire’s play aren’t seeking answers. Rabbit Hole begins eight months after Becca (Deborah Hazlett) and Howie (Paul Morella) lost their four-year-old son in a tragic auto accident. Since the accident, they’ve been stuck in their grief: They’ve pristinely maintained their son’s room, they haven’t had sex, nor have they disposed of the deceased child’s clothing.

Rejecting Jesus freaks

When Becca’s nose-ring sporting, irresponsible younger sister Izzy (Megan Anderson) becomes pregnant and decides to keep the baby because it will “give her clarity,” she reignites Becca’s anger at her loss. Becca’s mom Nat (Kate Kiley) lends the gravity of a matronly experience and wisdom, Izzy consoles, and Howie asks Becca to return to group therapy. The atheistic Becca rejects all these options, denigrating the therapy group members as “Jesus freaks” trying to find some ridiculous meaning, “people who’d step in shit” and claim “it’s God’s plan.”

While Howie watches videotapes of his son to fall asleep at night, Becca decides they should sell the house and move. In the meantime, with nothing to rail against but misfortune, she lashes out at everything and everyone else instead. Throughout, Hazlett subtexts her incrementally nastier actions by looking for household items to clean, displacing her grief while still protecting the turf of her anguish. When the exasperated Howie offers to “try again” (that is, have another child), she deals him a look like she’s cocking a punch.

A world in a single room

Rabbit Hole digs out a very small world for its drama: All the action takes place on Marie-Noëlle Daigneault’s upscale Long Island home interior, one that feels both lived in yet cold and punishing in its somber hues and stark overhanging, lifeless branches. But in this production, the cast and director turn this very small universe into something richly textured by the fine performances.

Director Mitchell Hébert achieves a balance of emotion and nuance from his cast, seamlessly integrating moments of revelatory introspection while making visible all of Lindsay-Abaire’s probing psychological insights about loss, grief and the role of humor in the slow evaporation of guilt. Only the occasional clichéd dialogue (“I can’t do this, like this”) causes disengagement, and in this talk-heavy script, some of the best anecdotes— like the two girl fights— I wanted to see acted out.

A reprieve from guilt and shame

Rabbit Hole contends that “People want things to make sense” and asks how one is “supposed to find comfort” when things don’t. In one of the last scenes, Becca asks Nat (who also lost a son), “This feeling, does it ever go away?”

Eventually, like guilt and shame, people want a reprieve from grief and start looking for any answer, and Becca finds one, in a heart-rending scene in which the high school senior who drove the fatal car (Aaron Bliden) gives her a science-fiction story he wrote and dedicated to Becca’s son.

It’s in that story that the play finds its title and Becca discovers a framework for moving forward. The “rabbit hole” is a fictionalized concept from physics, a passageway between multiple, simultaneously occurring parallel universes. As Jason tells her, if we accept that space is infinite, then one of those parallel realms contains a world in which Becca’s son didn’t die, but lives on, playing happily with the dog he chased into traffic.

That old religious false hope

But although Becca’s committed atheist finally thinks she’s found an answer in science, Rabbit Hole only continues the problem of grounding religious concepts in scientific theories (even if there’s a possible world in which her son may live, he no longer lives in this one). She has no way to see her son again, so her comfort in the “rabbit hole” idea differs little from the same old false-hope notion of an afterlife.

Some religious thinkers equate godlessness with immorality. Rabbit Hole suggests the opposite. In the face of massive uncertainty, a worldview grounded in reality demands that we possess the courage to face this world without illusions— even illusions coated with alleged scientific merit.