Time Out Chicago - 25. July 2009

Blackbird: a dissenting view
Posted in Theater by John Beer on July 25th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Victory Gardens’ current production of David Harrower’s Blackbird has been greeted with nearly universal acclaim. And news of its extension to August 9 was enough to melt down the theater’s reservation system. I made the trek to the Biograph Theater on Wednesday (the anniversary of John Dillinger’s death, no less) to see Billy Petersen and Mattie Hawkinson duel it out. But while I agree that the two actors turn in accomplished performances in arduous roles (and as set designer, Dean Taucher is no slouch, either), I found myself decidedly less enamored with Harrower’s play.

As you’ve probably heard, Blackbird (British slang for an ex-con) revolves around a sexual relationship between 56-year-old Ray (Petersen) and Una (Hawkinson), now 27, when she was 12. The topic is, to put it lightly, controversial; plenty of people find the very idea that Ray is portrayed as anything but a predatory monster intolerable. That doesn’t seem like a very productive stance toward the play, in my view. It’s not as though we need another contemporary bear-baiting exhibition like NBC’s vile To Catch a Predator, as exploitative an effort as one could imagine regarding the issue of child sexual abuse.

And to some degree, Blackbird is more effective in its delineation of the damage Ray’s done because it registers complexities. When Una, in the lengthy monologue that forms the core of the play, describes herself as happily waiting in a motel room for Ray, eager for “her man” to bring her chocolate, the detail is precise and heartbreaking. It’s the voice of a child who wants very badly to be fully grown, and as Hawkinson’s performance makes clear, Ray, by taking advantage of this desire, has left her marooned in childhood even as an adult.

What bothers me about Blackbird isn’t the complexities it offers, but what it lacks: in a word, drama. It’s not that Petersen and Hawkinson don’t get ample opportunity to show their vocal registers or throw things around. But the situation between the two characters is fundamentally undramatic—because there really isn’t anything for them to do about it. It’s not even clear that it make sense to talk about a shared situation. The events that matter have all happened fifteen years before Una shows up at Ray’s workplace. So, when the play ends without clear resolution, that doesn’t seem like Harrower’s artistic choice: it seems like his acknowledgement of the limits of his setup.

Those limits ultimately had three consequences for me as a viewer. First, since we’re given virtually nothing about this pair except for their relationship as abuser and abused, the play comes to seem more like a kind of case study of a particular kind of crime than a fully-fledged drama (maybe appropriate for CSI’s Petersen, but still disappointing). Second, the imbalance of power between the two characters, in setting up Una as, however enraged, still supplicant to Ray, who still gets to slip out of the room at the end, replicates the logic of the original abusive situation, but does so arbitrarily: Una’s left putting herself at Ray’s mercy again simply because that’s how the play sets it up. And it’s the conjunction of these aspects that makes the play feel exploitative to me. It purports on one level to give a clear-eyed examination of sexual abuse, but its lack of context and dramatic inertia leave it uncomfortably close to presenting the situation simply for our entertainment: uneasy entertainment, to be sure, but entertainment nonetheless.