REVIEW OF STUDIO 17’S PRODUCTION OF BLACKBIRD
Here’s what we know about Off-Off-Broadway shows: The acting can be hit or miss. The set design is almost consistently a miss, but we’re expected to ignore this shortcoming – and we do. The direction is usually a scrappy wrangling of volunteers, inexperience, ego, and a lot of goodwill. Most Off-Off-Broadway shows have only been developed in front of a safe circle of friends and family, where applause is gifted rather than earned, which is never helpful for recognizing and excising bad elements. As a playwright, I’ve witnessed excellent writing mowed down by what I’d generously call “experimental” acting. I’ve witnessed horrible writing elevated to an enjoyable experience by good actors who’d be fascinating to watch just texting on a toilet. So, in an Off-Off-Broadway show, the fact that a play won an Olivier Award is just another element of suspense rather than a reliable credential.
So how was Studio 17’s Off-Off-Broadway production of David Harrower’s Olivier Award winning Blackbird?
I’d never seen a production of Blackbird. I’d heard of it, of course. Any person who loves theater hears the buzz this show makes whenever it’s revived: 15 years after the dramatic end of an affair between an adult male and a 12-year-old female, she crashes his place of work. When I took my seat, a woman nodded at me to see if she recognized me or I her. She didn’t. I didn’t. I learned afterwards this woman was Suzanne DiDonna, the director. It’s a name I won’t soon forget.
From the opening sixty seconds, I knew…no I felt…this play was helmed by an extremely talented and capable director who knows when to narrow the parameters and when to open the cages. For example, from lights up we’re thrust into the middle of a tense pause. The preparation for this pause requires that gorgeous collaboration/permission/exploration between the playwright, the director, and both actors. This first moment is critical to the play, because, at a lean 70 minutes, there’s no time to waste: the audience must immediately feel that these two lives have been tossed up into the storm clouds by some kind of F5 tornado, and they’re desperately waiting to land again. Beyond this first moment, the director’s and actors’ task is to keep that tornado spinning…delaying any sense of true resolution and calm…until the very end. They succeeded. I was breathless from lights up to lights down. Studio 17’s production of Blackbird on every front was solid, solid, solid - with an emotional muscularity that absorbs as much as it strikes.
The benefit of not having seen a play before is that everything is fresh. I’m so grateful to have seen this play without Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams (the original Broadway stars) as points of comparison. For 70 minutes I watched Emilie Rose Bak and Scott McCord carve sculptures of broken people that will now be the art against which every other actor who portrays these characters will be measured against. This will sound hyperbolic, but I assure you it’s not: Emilie Rose Bak and Scott McCord sustained a level of intensity and vulnerability that I haven’t seen since Uta Hagen and Laila Robins in Mrs. Klein…or Audra McDonald in Gypsy. If you’ve seen either of these shows, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a fever pitch that Emilie and Scott seemed to have ramped up to prior to curtain - and then sustain until the curtain - and the miracle is that it didn’t seem overindulgent. Their truths were powerfully appropriate to the imaginary circumstances and vital to the emotionally bloody tug-of-war that’s to follow. It’s none of our damn business how these actors prepared, but any audience member wowed by this first moment should be both curious...and inspired.
Overlapping dialogue has increasingly become a tool of naturalism in theater that, I suspect, David Mamet brought to the fore. The rush of overlapping dialogue can be riveting but not necessarily required (The Public Theater’s latest production of A Raisin in the Sun), or somewhat irritating (I won’t name the company’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire because one day I’ll need the actress to star in one of my plays.). I’ve never seen Blackbird’s script, so I don’t know if the overlapping dialogue was prescribed, a directorial choice, an acting choice, or all of the above. However, watching this drama unfold, the overlapping dialogue, the impulsive fumbling to express thoughts, the abrupt interruptions, and the mid-sentence ellipses all felt crucial to conveying the characters’ driving, urgent, subtextual needs and anxieties. Emilie and Scott’s delivery forcefully impacted us with their desperate impatience to unearth their pain…or bury it. My heart raced from beginning to end. The erratic, hectic dialogue also underscored the significance of the few poignant pauses and the wrenching monologues…which suddenly intercepted our characters’ gallop to who-knows-where like thin, fraying rope bridges across very treacherous ravines.
This leads to one of the most important questions of the play.
We all agree that he raped her. We all agree this was illegal. We all agree this was morally reprehensible. However, what David Harrower seems to be challenging us to entertain is the notion that our need to label the crime as “rape” flattens all the nuance around the affair as evil...and that generalization can lead to even more lasting damage. Yes, he ought not to have fallen in love with a minor or any kind of physical intimacy. Yes, her childlike crush on an older man ought never to have been encouraged to develop into what she felt was love. Obviously. But that doesn’t negate the fact she nonetheless experienced the most overwhelming feelings she’d ever felt in her life…and apparently will ever feel in her life. In fact, and I could be wrong, I don’t believe the word “rape” ever fell from her mouth in this play. Because of the disgust and illegality of the affair, all surrounding her were so eager to protect her from the crime and erase it from existence. But the lasting result of this hurried sweep-up? This entire play. She enters his place of work uninvited because she needs to be there. Is it closure she’s looking for, and what would that look like? Does she merely want an apology? Or to kill him? Or to continue the affair?
I won’t spoil the ending, but, as always in theater, the questions are far more important than the answers. The entire creative team and the playwright leaned into what I’ve always held close to my heart as truth: ambiguity is far more riveting than conclusiveness. Above all else, Suzanne DiDonna directed a powerful production of a powerful play in a small theater on the 3rd floor of a building that isn’t even marked by a discernible street number. This entire evening reinforced why I remain enamored by this city: even in the smallest corner it’s populated by such talented, risk-taking, creative people.
DEFINITELY GO SEE BLACKBIRD:
April 10-20, 2025 (8 performances)
Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. / Sundays at 2:00 p.m.
Studio 17: 13 West 17th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10011
General Admission Tickets are $35.00
For tickets, visit: Eventbrite
Direct Ticketing Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/blackbird-at-studio-17-tickets-1298719056659