Blackbird – 2009
Image © Liz Lauren
Miles from CSI, William Petersen galvanizes as a pedophile in ‘Blackbird(examiner.com)
With the spare, riveting Blackbird, David Harrower does the near impossible: Tells a story that has you empathizing with a pedophile. Without ever diminishing the all-but unspeakably heinous gravity of the crime, Harrower humanizes the criminal, creating an anti-hero who has who is as loveable as he is horrible. You’ll ache for this man, while at the same time shuddering in fury.
People may flock to Blackbird on the strength of the marquee – CSI’s Bill Petersen stars. But they’ll leave shaken to the core by a character who bears no resemblance to Gil Grissom and a production directed to searing perfection by Dennis Zacek for the Victory Gardens Theater. There’s no doubt about guilt, or about the heinous nature of the crime at the broken heart of the story. This isn’t about a 20-year-old caught making out with a high school junior. It is about a 40-year-old man having sex multiple times over many months with a 12-year-old girl, the daughter of a friend.
When Blackbird opens, Ray (Petersen) is in his mid-50s, He has served years in prison for the crime, changed his name, and remade himself as a management cog in a dreary, nondescript supply company. When Una (Mattie Hawkinson, riveting as a survivor badly, indelibly scarred) shows up unexpectedly in the company’s filthy basement lunchroom (authentic down to the last Styrofoam container and overflowing trash can thanks to set designer Dean Taucher) , it’s as if the walls have started closing in. The oppressive weight of rage, irretrievable loss and irreparable injury becomes as palpable as the sticky candy wrappers underfoot and the barely audible hum of the Coke machine.
Much of the piece’s complexity lies in the sheer ordinariness of Petersen’s Ray. He isn’t some evil exotic or larger-than-life villain . He’s the working-class schlub you’d buy a beer for at the neighborhood pub, the neighbor who helps you dig your car out of the snow, far more Willy Loman than Hannibal Lecter. And there’s no equivocating the monstrosity of what he’s done.
Yet it’s not the descriptions of oral sex on a 12-year-old body or groping barely pubescent breasts in a public park that horrify the most. It’s the aftermath of these events.
“You left me alone. Bleeding. You left me. You left me in love,” Una says. It was a life sentence, making Ray’s six in prison (“Blackbird” is British slang for an ex-convict) years seem like a slap on the wrist. But as it turns out, and as Petersen makes so gut-wrenchingly vivid, Ray’s been living out his own life sentence. At least, that’s how it seems. The moral ambiguity of the piece is both brilliant and shattering. Can unforgivable crimes be committed with integrity, and even love?
Then there’s this wholly disquieting truth, disgorged as Ray and Una resurrect their devastating past:
“Adults lie. They don’t even know they’re doing it.”
It’s a sentence of bone-truth, and one that throws everything we’ve learned about Ray into question.
Harrower then ups the stakes further still. In the final moments of the production, he brings in a third character whose entrance elicited an audible, justifiable shock from the opening night audience.
Just before that final, hellishly ambiguous revelation, Harrower creates a prolonged, scene that is almost unbearably awful. Not awful in the sense that the play is lacking in any means – quite the polar opposite. It is a scene so excruciatingly tense the very atmosphere seems about to snap into a thousand razor-edged shards.
Surely the bogey man – the terror that has been quietly, unmistakably accruing for so long – is about to engulf these characters we’ve come to care so deeply for, and destroy them like a wolf ripping the heart from a lamb. It’s the stuff of panic attacks and sudden suffocation. It is also illustrative of the unnerving, tragic power of Blackbird.
Mattie Hawkinson wipes the floor with William Petersen in ‘Blackbird’ at Victory Gardens (Chicago Tribune)
In the new Victory Gardens production of David Harrower’s harrowing “Blackbird,” a Chicago actress named Mattie Hawkinson wipes the floor with William Petersen, star of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and the name above the title on the infamous Biograph Theatre marquee.
Actually, that doesn’t adequately describe it. In a career-making performance, at once determined, vulnerable, nuanced and primal, Hawkinson tosses Petersen into the garbage. This destruction reduces Petersen to a shaking, eye-rubbing, terrified, spiteful, hollow-eyed, self-loathing piece of jelly.
And that is greatly to his credit. Few high-profile stars of TV procedurals would return to an intense, unforgiving Chicago stage for such a public battering and meltdown, especially in service of a play that revolves around a young woman named Una, who shows up at the workplace of her former lover, Ray, ready to confront him with the sexual affair the couple had 15 years ago. When he was 40 and she was 12.
“Blackbird,” which began at the Edinburgh International Festival and caused something of a critical sensation when it showed up in London in 2007, is one of the best British plays of the decade. Its qualities are myriad, but many of them flow from the sparse intensity of Harrower’s writing, and his clear-eyed ability to explore all of the facets of such a poisonous relationship and its consequences without ever justifying or rationalizing what went on between a messed-up middle-age man and a needy almost-adolescent in a little seaside guesthouse.
This is a play about a sexual predator and his prey. One never doubts that. But Harrower also dares to look at all sides. And because he is willing to explore how the victim of such a crime must live with a complex stew of feelings—revolving around her own identity and a perverse longing for the man who caused such trauma—“Blackbird” ends up as a far deeper condemnation of such a selfish act than the typical two-dimensional treatments that have long dominated the dramatic depiction of this most disturbing of subjects.
The less you know in advance about exactly what Una does to Ray in the break room of his workplace, the better. She tells us early on that she wanted to stamp out his eyes. He tells her she is “some kind of ghost, turning up from nowhere to …”
This is a great script—and I don’t use that adjective lightly—because it shows us how a democratic society’s calibration is enhanced by fullness of ethical exploration. Indeed, “Blackbird” makes the case that an understanding of human complexity is a prerequisite for moral behavior. And, despite a subject that makes your skin crawl, it manages to spiral off into other gripping moral matters.
One ponders past mistakes and the likelihood of their sudden re-appearance. One ponders past assaults on oneself. And one starts to think about the trickiest issue within this particular area of jurisprudence: If a sexual predator claims a one-off transgression and pays a price of incarceration, can he ever be let off the hook? Can he ever be allowed to go about his business? Does he deserve to be hunted until he drops into his grave?
“Blackbird” has no answers. It recalls David Mamet’s “Oleanna” in its ambiguities (but not its sympathies), and also Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” in its rich understanding of the journey faced by a victim of abuse. It also is very much its own beast.
Hawkinson has mostly played quirky comedic roles to date. She has never been cast here in anything quite like this. And under Dennis Zacek’s direction, she lobs lines, pleads, emotes, rages and, it feels, twists her entire body into the emotional pretzel that her character has become. Hollowed, callow and, as the play demands, pathetically sympathetic, Petersen, who digs far deeper than he did in “Dublin Carol” at Steppenwolf last year, takes you on the fullest of emotional journeys. You are right there with him, and you are also nowhere near him, which is exactly right.
“Blackbird,” which was produced in New York in 2007 with Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill, has not been Americanized well. Its setting still feels mostly British. But that’s a trivial flaw. There’s also a moment in this production—one involving the aforementioned garbage—that doesn’t feel fully earned. Trivial again.
This must-see show of the summer gets right pretty much everything that matters, beginning with a set from Dean Taucher that’s the best design I’ve seen in this particular theater. If it looks deceptively ordinary, look again. You could say that about the whole show.
Thanks to a pair of deeply gutsy performances and Zacek’s quietly courageous direction, “Blackbird” had the Victory Gardens audience fully in its claws at Monday night’s opening. At one wrenching moment, the whole theater seemed to let out a cry, almost in unison, but not quite.
“Blackbird” Opens at Victory Gardens Biograph Theater (Candid Candace of chicagonow.com)
“Blackbird” opened last night at the Victory Gardens Theatre starring William Petersen and Mattie Hawkinson. This is British playwright David Harrower’s raw and provocative two person drama about the destructive cycle of desire and illicit love. Victory Gardens Artistic Director and all-around good guy, Dennis Zacek, directs “Blackbird” which won the 2007 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, which is Britain’s equivalent of the Tony.
I admit I am not a fan of dramas and prefer to escape in light hearted musicals like “Mary Poppins”but I must say this play gave me goose bumps and kept me on the edge of my seat. The Associated Press says it is “a fascinating and unnerving 90 minute cat and mouse tale of revenge and sexual intrigue, with genuine theatricality and undeniable shock value.” I concur wholeheartedly. The play has no intermissions during the 90 minutes and when the last heart breaking words are uttered, you don’t realize that the time has flown by!
“Blackbird” is the British vernacular for “jailbird” and the story revolves around the awkward reunion of Ray and Una 15 years after a passionate affair when he was 40 and she was a minor. In the end, “Blackbird” will leave the audience stunned. I promise.
Review: Blackbird/Victory Gardens ( Newcity Stage)
At what point does a child’s mind become adult, not necessarily in a carnal way, but in a more abstract sense, roughly defined as having “adult emotions” and the ability to make “adult decisions”? The truth is that no one knows, but society takes a definitive stance on the issue nonetheless. You have to be 16 to drive a car, 18 to die in a war or to vote, 21 to drink a beer. But when are you old enough to know real love, or to have sex? On this question, even the states can’t quite agree. It’s 17 in Illinois, but over in Indiana, apparently, the young mature faster: 16 out of wedlock, but tie the knot and you can do the whoopie at 14. At least we can all agree that sex with a 12-year-old is wrong, right? But what to make of the likes of Mary Kay Letourneau, the school teacher who was impregnated by her 13-year-old student and now, a decade and a jail sentence later, is married to him, with two children?
Such musings are inevitable after taking in David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” which beat out the likes of Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll” and Peter Morgan’s “Frost/Nixon” for the prestigious 2007 Laurence Olivier Award—Britain’s equivalent of the Tony—and is now having its Chicago premiere at Victory Gardens. Add William Peterson in only his second role since abdicating the “CSI” throne in favor of Chicago theater last year, and you have perhaps this summer’s most widely anticipated production which, thankfully, exceeds expectations, with a tightly rendered and tightly wound staging helmed by Victory Gardens’ artistic director Dennis Zacek.
The story of a fifteen-years-later confrontation between Ray and Una, who’d had a sexual relationship when he was 40 and she was 12—set in Dean Taucher’s spot-on creation of an office lunchroom that’s clearly outlived its prime—takes place in a gripping ninety or so minutes that brings to mind a jack-in-the-box: the handle cranks tighter and tighter, while we just wait for one of the characters to pop.
After serving his time in prison, Ray’s exiled himself. He’s built a wall, crafted a new life and knows he should protect it—”I don’t have to talk to you” he tells Una (and himself)—but he cannot hold back. Una’s found him, in one of those countless anonymous low-slung buildings clustering in office parks where, as she observes, no one knows what goes on inside. Peterson not only nails the complex speech patterns crafted by Harrower, poetically conjuring Mamet at first when the discomfort of the confrontation leaves both characters striving for syntax, but his facial expressions alone are a canvas of dialogue that need not be spoken.
Mattie Hawkinson’s Una is a daunting challenge, both in role and casting. Peterson’s stage legend and current celebrity looms large in this two-hander; she more than holds up and makes this a play of equals, walking a fine line of performance. She’s always vulnerable, on the very edge of disintegration, but never pathetic. As Ray says, she’s strong. The whole enterprise hinges on Una being a fragile flower, though not fully crushed, with the lingering perfume of attraction. You want to hug her and to have her.
In creating such ambiguity of victimization, Harrower’s play challenges conventional morality without caution, leaving the broader social agenda to placards in the lobby. This one is personal. As Nabokov wrote in the the second line of “Lolita”: “My sin, my soul.” That is the question. (Brian Hieggelke)
Bye Bye Blackbird ( From the Ledge)
Having lived in Chicago for more than ten years now, summer in this city is all about the lakefront, outdoor festivals such as Ravinia and the Grant Park Music Festival, slow, lazy afternoons grilling with friends and sipping Coronas. The major arts groups in the city are either on hiatus, wrapping up their seasons, or putting on light, easy-on-the-eyes-and-on-the-brain fare. I don’t think there has been a recent summer where one of the big arts and culture news is all about the fact that one of the city’s major cultural institutions is presenting a provocative, complex, deeply uncomfortable but undeniably memorable work. Part of it is probably because a lot of people (especially the ones who aren’t familiar with his gritty, pre-stardom work in Chicago’s burgeoning off-loop theater scene in the 1970s) have been caught off-guard that CSIsuperstar William Petersen will take on material that goes to a very dark place, with surprising, and to some, disturbing, overtones of moral ambiguity. But I think most of it is due to the fact that we haven’t seen material as brilliant, as complicated, as gnawing as David Harrower’s Blackbird, winner of the 2007 Laurence Olivier Award, the British theater’s equivalent of the Tony Awards, Best New Play (besting a heavyweight group comprised of Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll, Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, and Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer), on a Chicago stage in a while. If there is one thing that should pull you away from summer’s airy distractions, it is to see Blackbird at Victory Gardens Theatre, assuredly directed by Artistic Director Dennis Zacek, the best local production I have seen so far this year. If for some inexcusable reason you are not able to see it, consider yourself culturally and artistically malnourished.
Blackbird, on the outset, seems like a simple play. There’s only one set, a sterile, nondescript, trash-filled conference room in a manufacturing plant or a similar-type office location. Except for the blackout near the end, there are hardly any lighting effects, just unfussy lighting. There are only two characters, Ray, now known as Peter (Petersen), a schlumpy, mid-level type manager in his 50s who works in this office, and the well-dressed, well-spoken, but tightly wound-up late-twentysomething woman who visits him, Una (Mattie Hawkinson). But Blackbird, and its emotions, its constructs, its stealth attack on our moral certainties, is far from simple – as the first couple of scenes play out, we realize that Ray and Una had an affair 15 years before when he was 40 and she was 12. After all that time, Una, for whatever reason, has sought Ray out and re-entered his life.
Like all great playwriting, Blackbird and Harrower doesn’t let us off easy. Unlike what some pretty boisterous commenters on Chris Jones’ blog seems to think (have they actually seen the play?), Harrower makes it clear that Ray was a predator, that he knew what he was doing, and that what he was doing constituted child abuse. I think the more ambiguous point that Harrower makes, and the one that is the most unsettling, is on Una’s purpose for actively seeking out Ray after all these years. Did she come to visit him at his workplace to carry out a delayed revenge scenario where his payback will be humiliation at the unmasking of the carefully re-built life he is now leading? Or did she come to seek closure, to finally be able to go adult head-to-adult head with the person who wrecked her life and to let pent-up recriminations and hurt gush forth? Or, more confoundingly, did Una come to see Ray in order to kindle, or gulp, re-kindle, a romantic relationship that she has been carrying the torch for (albeit a torch blazing with a lot of fury and hurt) all these years? Is there a possibility that there was, and there continues to be, some semblance of love, on her part? What kind of love is a child capable of, and in the same vein, that child’s adult self, given what she has gone through? Harrower’s brilliance is in raising this doubt in us, the audience, a doubt that challenges our moral concepts, pre, post, otherwise. This is what, for me, makes the play a shattering experience.
Una is definitely the crux of the moral arguments in the play, and it is a breathtakingly complex and terrifying character. Mattie Hawkinson, who I saw at the recent Goodman production of Rock’n’Roll, gives a blazingly indelible performance. While watching her, awestruck, I thought to myself, was this how the Chicago audiences in the 1970s felt when they were watching the young Joan Allen or the young Laurie Metcalf in the early Steppenwolf productions: full of certainty in the future acting superstardom of a brilliant, daring actress? I firmly believe that Hawkinson will be the next big thing in Chicago theater after this performance. The role is a daunting mega-rollercoaster of emotions, moving from fury to confusion to inquisition to hurt to tenderness in half and quarter beats, but Hawkinson brilliantly delivers. When she recounts that fateful day on the beach and the bed and breakfast room that Ray rented, she delicately but pointedly brings you into the 12 year old Una’s state of mind and point of view, which makes the recounting of the events and emotions more heartbreaking. I don’t think it’s easy to pull off an acting heist when William Petersen is around, but Hawkinson definitively, unapologetically does.
Which brings us to Petersen, the reason for the close-to-sold-out run at Victory Gardens where he got his Actor’s Equity card. He may be the celebrity that everyone is stampeding to the Biograph to see, but Ray is definitely a secondary character, more reactive and less emotionally volatile than Una. I’ve always admired him, but I admire him more now after this play for a couple of reasons: he unselfishly gives Hawkinson the opportunity to shine in the more difficult role, and he has taken on a complicated, and at times reprehensible, character to do so. I think this should have been Petersen’s triumphant return to Chicago theater, not the tepid Dublin Carol at Steppenwolf last winter. It is a terrific, nuanced performance, not as showy as Hawkinson’s, but also steadily moving across a continuum of emotions: guilt, anxiety, defensiveness, tenderness, sexual tension. The scene when he talks about going back to the bar after Una has wandered in looking for her “father” is devastating. Petersen’s performance also effectively raises another one of Harrower’s points: at what point can someone be called redeemed after committing such a heinous act – when can you say that someone has irrevocably atoned? It is an interesting angle which makes Ray the sexual deviant more grey shading than black and white tone…until the twist close to the end of the play where your perspectives on him are jarred once again. By choosing to appear in Blackbird instead of the myriad of other material at his disposal, some of them I’m sure more audience-pleasing, William Petersen’s comeback to the theater that formed him has enriched our city’s cultural life in one fell swoop.
Poetic ‘Blackbird’ draws us into its convoluted nest (Chicago Suntimes)
You can understand why actors might easily be magnetized by Scottish playwright David Harrower’s play “Blackbird,” which received its Chicago debut Monday night at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater.
To begin with, Harrower’s language is alternately teasing and poetic — at once real and stilted in that deftly passive-aggressive manner of David Mamet. On top of this, there is the writer’s intriguing ability to capture real-time tension while simultaneously suggesting how it is so easily trumped by the far more potent, sensual time of memory. And then there is the way Harrower slyly recapitulates past behavior by creating similar actions and responses in the present moment. Certain aspects of character, he suggests, are rooted in our hard wiring.
Finally, there is the playwright’s sense of emotional entrapment in all its forms. After all, his play presents us with two profoundly troubled souls — Ray (William L. Petersen) and Una (Mattie Hawkinson — who have been wrestling with the fearsome ghost of the other for 15 years. Now, here they are in the same room, engaged in a long-delayed reckoning about a traumatic event they know can never be expunged from memory.
Yet director Dennis Zacek’s airtight production provoked this thought: While I completely understood why Una came to this room, I couldn’t quite believe Ray would not flee. But then again, perhaps he craved this exorcism of psychic garbage every bit as much as she did.
Ambivalence and ambiguity? Absolutely. They are built into the play. The question remains: Can you fully buy into the scenario? Is its mix of incendiary perversity and brutally honest sexual and emotional truths enough to hold you for 80 minutes? The answer is yes, but with some reservations.
The story — and it very much belongs to the young woman — is this: Ray was a 40-year-old neighbor of Una’s family when her parents invited him to a barbecue. She was 12 at the time — emotionally sophisticated in a mysterious way. They had a three-month “relationship” with a catastrophic outcome for both. Now, all these years later, she has found him again. Was it a one-time aberration for Ray? Even more unsettling, is Harrower suggesting this relationship was the big passion of both these people’s lives?
Hawkinson, a petite beauty of riveting intensity, is a knockout here. It isher play. Petersen, perhaps just a bit too warm and normal, lacks the creepiness factor. But perhaps that’s the point. You be the judge of that. But note: A surprise shift late in the play might alter your verdict.
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