Theater Review—

‘Rabbit Hole’: Searching For Comfort Through

The Anguish Of Death; Worth The Ride To Hartford

By Julie Stern

HARTFORD — The attention to realistic detail that is a hallmark of TheaterWorks Hartford is once again on display in the current production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Rabbit Hole. Gazing at Luke Hegel-Cantarella’s set  representing the interior of a suburban Westchester  house, my neighbor whispered “Makes you want to remodel your kitchen, doesn’t it.”

The commitment to authenticity extends to the food that is produced in that kitchen — crème caramel, raspberry walnut cake, zucchini bread, lemon bars and Bosco syrup. (“This is the eatingest play I’ve ever seen” my husband remarked at intermission.)

And it was definitely real, too, as evidenced by seeing one of the cast members happily heading homeward afterwards, bearing a large white cardboard bakery box.

But in no way was this a case of verisimilitude in props acting as a substitute for serious content. Rather, both the décor and the use of food were integral to the meaning of the play, which happens to be one of the best things I’ve seen in years. Performances continue at the Pearl Street theater.

Flawlessly directed by Rob Ruggiero, and performed by a wonderfully gifted cast, Rabbit Hole seems too, well, real to be just a play. We recognize Howie and Becca Corbett’s spacious kitchen — we’ve been there, and Howie and Becca are just like people we know — just like our friends,  but friends to whom something so terrible has happened, that we are hesitant to face them.

Well, so what’s it about, anyway? The Corbetts are an attractive and successful young couple whose life was fractured on a June day when their four-year-old son, Danny, darted out into the street in pursuit of his dog, which was chasing a squirrel, and was struck and killed by a 17-year old driving to school.

Eight months later, they are still wrestling with profound and intractable grief. Howie seems to find some solace in his work, in a support group, and in his computer. Becca’s pain is too great to allow her to connect with anyone. Tight-lipped and tense, she stalks about the room, snapping angrily at her husband, her mother, and her bouncy, bad girl kid sister, while cutting herself off from her best friend, because the friend still has children, so what would they have to talk about?

Izzy, the sister, is a good humored neer-do-well, a failed waitress who has just gotten pregnant by a struggling musician. Nat, their mother, is a clownish bumbler given to rambling digressions about the Kennedy family.

Amazingly, the interactions between these characters are hilariously funny (a trademark of Lindsay-Abaire’s work), so that even as the pain is heartbreakingly palpable, the audience is laughing out loud.

The whole point of the play is to capture the anguish caused by death, and the ways in which people search for comfort. That’s where all the delicious looking food comes in: Becca keeps dishing it out, but it doesn’t fill the emptiness.

The four scenes in the first act are set in February, when the situation seems hopeless. Howie sits in the dark, secretly watching an old video of his son. Becca demands that they sell the house. She can’t bear how the memory of Danny lurks in every corner. Rigidly, she rejects her husband’s touch. Everything he does is wrong; everything he says hurts.

The second act takes place three months later. Just as time is measured by the growing bulge in Izzy’s waistline, so in small touches, there are gradual signs of healing. Becca allows her mother to help with the task of boxing up Danny’s things and redecorating his room. “You have to do it quickly, like a Band-Aid,” Becca advises Nat when she is momentarily transfixed by a little boy’s sneaker.

Earlier Nat has talked about losing a son herself, when 12 years ago Becca’s thirty-year-old brother committed suicide. Back in February, Becca had no sympathy to spare, but now she is able to ask “Does it ever go away? This pain?”

 “No,” her mother tells her, honestly, but after a while it “becomes like a brick. You carry it around with you, but you can put it in your pocket, and sometimes you can forget about it for days at a time … and eventually it becomes your brick.”

As in Lindsay Abaire’s other plays, all the characters emerge as human beings of dignity and decency. We see them grow, their expressions relax, they start to connect with one another and we see that finally, the possibility of comfort does exist.

As I said, before, the cast — Dylan Chalfy as Howie, Joey Parsons as Izzy, Erika Rolfsrud as Becca, Jo Twiss as Nat, and Alec Silberblatt as Jason (the driver of the fatal car) — is uniformly excellent. 

Powerful, enthralling, and humane, Rabbit Hole is truly worth a trip up to Hartford.

(TheaterWorks Hartford can be reached by calling 860-527-7838.)