Remembrance of Things Past

Blackbird, at the Belasco Theatre

Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams in a promotional still from Blackbird.

Blackbird, by David Harrower, opens at the Belasco, in its Broadway premiere, on March 10^th, and true to the playwright’s name, it manages to be harrowing without entirely achieving the similarly difficult feat of being meaningful.  It originated at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, then transferred to the West End, where it won the 2007 Olivier Award for Best Play.  That same year it came to the Manhattan Theatre Club, with Jeff Daniels and Allison Pill in its two primary roles and directed by Joe Mantello.  In the eight years since it’s had over forty productions around the world, and a film version, starring Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, is due later this year.  So most of the team from that MTC production (minus Ms. Pill, who’s gotten an ABC drama since) has been reassembled for this production.

Mr. Mantello, who’s also responsible for this season’s The Humans, a painful play about a reunion between once-close compatriots who hurt and keep things from one another, is dealt a similar hand here.  Ray (Mr. Daniels), a possibly reformed pedophile who has started a new life under the name Peter, is visited at his workplace by Una (Michelle Williams, replacing Ms. Pill), his victim (although it becomes a matter of perspective whether this is the right word).  It’s been fifteen years since they’ve seen each other; their relationship occurred when she was twelve and he was forty.  Una never left her hometown and has suffered disgrace and humiliation, whereas Ray, after serving less than three years in prison, has, as Una sees it, gotten off scot-free.  She wants resolution, and confronts her abuser in his office’s garbage-scattered breakroom, as “Peter’s” coworkers slide by behind fogged windows like sharks circling for the attack.

Blackbird has power, undoubtedly, but it’s largely due to its performances, and those are interesting more in terms of actorly vivacity than dramatic talent.  Mr. Daniels makes Ray altogether too sympathetic, which may seem an unfair criticism given that the challenge with a character like Ray is to make him sympathetic in the first place, but it must be said that Mr. Harrower’s writing and Mr. Daniels’ performance never altogether plumb the depths of this man’s psyche.  He seems more neurotic than ashamed, but too uncomfortable with the situation to truly be unaffected by Una’s presence. 

Ms. Williams, meanwhile, in her second Broadway appearance, does nearly the same thing with Una as she did with Sally Bowles in Cabaret, two years ago.  She delivers a twitchy, spasmodic performance ripe with tics that would commonly be described as overacting, but so unique in their enactment it’s almost impossible to come down on one side or the other as to whether it’s any good.  Her Bowles was nearly un-criticize-able because no one was really sure what she was doing; I felt much the same way about her Una.  When she’s not girded by superior material, however, it’s more difficult to give her the benefit of the doubt; when I recall Carey Mulligan’s performance in Skylight last year, as another spurned woman confronted with her much older and crueler former lover, I think of stillness and strength despite an unraveling personal life.  Onstage, Ms. Mulligan was a beacon, while Ms. Williams is a flickering, uncontrolled bug zapper.

Eventually, the play’s tenuous grasp on morality and motivation comes to seem confusing rather than fascinatingly disconcerting; Una’s transition from fury to a kind of an Oedipal desire is too abrupt to be convincing, and subtext alone makes not a dramatic tour-de-force.  All in all, the show rather parallels Scott Pask’s interesting set, which begins as a dreary, fluorescent-lit office hallway and literally unfolds into the conference room like a pop-up book.  The process of initiation draws you in, but gradually you’re left with something you’ve seen before.  To harrow is not to entertain.