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NEW YORK -- It isn't often that I'm tempted to leave a performance at intermission, then end up raving about the production.
In truth, the second act of David Lindsay-Abaire's new play, Rabbit Hole (*** 1/2 out of four), is even more excruciating than the first, though not in the sense I would apply that term to some other Broadway shows. What makes Hole, which opened Thursday at the Biltmore Theatre, almost unbearable to watch at times is its insistence on presenting a tragedy and its consequences with utter candor, and without sentimentality.
That tragedy involves a 4-year-old boy whom we never meet, and a car that swerves in the wrong direction at the wrong time. The focus is on the fallout, not only for the boy's family but for the seemingly well-meaning teenager behind the wheel. The playwright duly affords special attention to the parents, an elegant former career woman and an amiable broker who grapple with their grief in different and often conflicting ways.
Lindsay-Abaire has tackled uncomfortable subject matter before; his last play, Kimberly Akimbo, dealt with a teenage girl suffering from a rare aging disease. But for all his comic imagination, his writing has sometimes struck me as self-consciously clever. There is nothing winking or waggish about Hole, though; the dialogue is most impressive for capturing the awkwardness and pain of thinking people faced with an unthinkable situation -- and eventually, their capacity for survival, and even hope.
Daniel Sullivan's direction of this Manhattan Theatre Club production is similarly thoughtful, and he has a sterling cast, led by Cynthia Nixon as the boy's mother, Becca. Where her Sex and the City co-star Sarah Jessica Parker has entered her 40s still clinging to the cutesy persona that started becoming unseemly years ago, Nixon continues to display a range and a lack of vanity that portend a long and varied career. Here, she makes Becca's struggle to maintain her composure, and her sanity, wrenchingly real.
John Slattery is a supple foil as Becca's husband, Howie, who is at once more superficially easygoing and more openly emotional. The excellent Tyne Daly lends both levity and poignancy as Becca's mother, and Mary Catherine Garrison is pertly engaging as Becca's less responsible kid sister.
John Gallagher Jr. has a smaller but key role as the teenager, and he brings the right blend of adolescent goofiness and gentle pathos.
Notwithstanding a few corny flourishes -- among them John Gromada's made-for-TV incidental music -- these performances add to Hole's authenticity. I don't frequently advise people to pay good money to have their hearts broken, but trust me on this one.
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