Theater with a View presents David Lindsay-Abaire’s ‘Rabbit Hole’

Theater with a View, created four years ago by actor Nina Covalesky, differs from other outdoor ventures by producing modern small-cast plays, including Proof, Circle Mirror Transformation, and Detroit before this year's Rabbit Hole. David Lindsay-Abaire's 2006 drama takes place in Becca and Howie's suburban home, which set designer Stephan Moravski places on a gently sloping backyard lawn. Outdoor shows are often large-cast affairs (think Shakespeare) or site-specific productions for stories set in the outdoors. Not Rabbit Hole.

Circling more than just talk

The required furniture sits in a spacious circle of 50 white audience chairs, looking as if they were dropped from a hovering flying saucer. A sofa, coffee table, kitchen table and chairs, working refrigerator, and short bookshelf stand not quite level in lush grass. The configuration keeps the cast moving, and director Seth Reich stages the action so that all seats have an equal view. The circle feels like a 12-step meeting, which suits the play.

The venue's emotional discomfort, like the script's, sneaks up on us. Rabbit Hole features what Jeffrey Sweet calls, in his playwriting text The Dramatist's Toolkit, "high-context" dialogue: The characters know what they're talking about, but the audience does not. To provide us with backstory quickly, instead of artificially telling each other things they already know, we learn gradually what's causing tension between Becca (Covalesky) and Howie (Drew Seltzer), Becca's sister Izzy (Jessica Myhr), and their mother Nat (Jo Twiss).

The skillful writing is matched by smart, natural acting. At first, Becca and Izzy bicker as sisters will, and we hardly notice Becca folding children's clothes. Becca and Howie's squabbles, as well as the tensions between mother and daughters, seem normal and often funny, but a devastating situation gradually emerges. As Becca says to Nat, "You never just talk. It sounds like you're just talking but it's always so much more, isn't it."

Wounds and hope as darkness falls

I don't want to give anything away; part of Rabbit Hole's success — 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2007 Leading Actress Tony Award for Cynthia Nixon and four other nominations, a 2010 film adaptation — is its slow-boil intensity. Suffice it to say that the play explores coping with grief. The experience may be familiar to many — it revived painful memories for me — but that makes it no less harrowing. Rabbit Hole successfully explores how profound loss ripples through many lives, not only the family's but also those of well-meaning friends and innocent strangers who can't help but blame themselves. It also dares to express some tentative hope.

Theater with a View's production captures these qualities well, particularly in Covalesky's convincingly raw portrayal of Becca's slow-motion implosion. Seltzer's Howie is more entertainingly unstable, often charming and sarcastic, yet clearly wounded. Myhr's Izzy captures the sisterly dynamic perfectly; Twiss brings wisdom and dignity to Nat, who could easily be overplayed. Both provide much of the play's delicately measured humor. Connor Johnston, as a peripherally involved neighborhood teenager, makes a sympathetic catalyst for the play's cathartic climax.

The play's 7pm start provides sundown at just the right time: Rabbit Hole is darkest before its moment of emotional dawn, and Emilie Leasure's lighting isolates the characters in their own lonely universe, surrounded by darkness. Indoor furniture sitting on a lawn might look like a yard sale at first, but by the end, it feels so, so right.