Rabbit Hole
Going to the theatre fairly often eventually teaches you, inter alia, to infer from the folding of a small child's clothes, when there are no children in the cast, that the character folding the clothes is experiencing a terrible grief. And so it turns out in Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire's new play at the Manhattran Theatre Club. This is a third of the playwright's works that I have seen at MTC, each one in a larger theatre. There was the nightmarish farce (or perhaps it was a farcical nightmare), Fuddy Meers, at Stage II, the bad-surburb bleakness of Kimberley Akimbo at Stage I, and now, at the Biltmore, Mr Lindsay-Abaire's best work to date. Unlike the other two, it is completely naturalistic.
When I was in school, there were comedies and there were tragedies. There were funny plays and sad plays. Now, as if the "richest man in Vienna" were running things, plays handle very sad material with a lot of laughter. Think, for example, of Reckless, at MTC a little over a year ago. It begins with a wife's being rushed out of the house by her repentant husband so that she won't be home when the hit man arrives. He hired the hitman, and now it's too late to cancel. The whole scene was played an at antic speed that drew helpless laughter.
The humor in Rabbit Hole is strictly verbal, but its purpose is the same: laughing softens up the audience, makes it glad to be there. This makes the hard work much easier for everybody. Who wants to sit through a play about grieving parents? Who wants to read The Year of Magical Thinking? The success of works that make you laugh so you won't mind crying is probably a telling timestamp of our moment in history. The curious thing is that, while I remember laughing heartily, I don't remember what was so funny. It certainly wasn't the situations.
It's often said that the loss of an only child will drive a couple apart, and, in Rabbit Hole, Mr Lindsay-Abaire dramatizes one explanation of the phenomenon. The play begins...
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