Blackbird (Artists Rep)

[September 10th, 2008]

If the victim in Akira Kurosawa’s film crime classic Rashōmon had been a child and the witnesses limited to two, it might have resembled David Harrower’s unbearably horrid Blackbird. A critical success in Edinburgh, London and New York, this Olivier Award-winning drama places characters Ray and Una in the filthy breakroom of Ray’s employer for 90 minutes to air their dirty laundry.

The trouble? The last time they saw one another—15 years ago, when he was 40 and she was 12—he’d just finished giving her a good rogering in a dingy seaside guesthouse before leaving her, alone and bleeding, while he popped over to the pub for a pint.

Are you queasy yet? It gets worse—a lot worse. By the end you’ll want a shower, or maybe a lobotomy, because Harrower (whose surname could not be more appropriate), like a humorless Nabokov, forces us to sympathize with his pedophilic protagonist. As in Rashômon, Una and Ray have differing memories of the event, and nothing is quite as simple as it seems.

In Artists Rep’s production, directed by JoAnn Johnson, the unthinkable couple are played by Amaya Villazan and Allen Nause, the company’s artistic director. Nause, an Oregon Shakespeare Festival vet who amazes under good direction and bombs without it, is admirably convincing as the confused and repentant predator, believably distressed at the unwanted reunion. Villazan, a member of the company’s new resident acting company who will appear in three shows this season, gives her most forceful performance to date, rising from some early evening awkwardness on opening night to a frightening display of pain and passion.

It is, objectively, a pretty good production, well designed and lit to reflect the desolation of Ray and Una’s internal lives. And Blackbird is, if not exactly fun to watch, an impressive literary feat. But when all the damage is done and the house lights come up, one has to wonder­—to what end all this nastiness. What, Mr. Harrower, was the point?