In his latest play “Dana H.,” Lucas Hnath blurs the line between drama and documentary in a way that brings a new experience to audiences and new challenges to the actor cast in the drama’s only role: Hnath’s mother Dana Higginbotham.
In 1997, Higginbotham was a hospital chaplain in Orlando, Florida, where she befriended an ex-convict and neo-Nazi on the psychiatric ward who sought her advice on how to reinvent himself. After his release, a generous act of mercy turns into a five-month, life-threatening horror story as he insinuates himself into her life.
Higginbotham wanted her son, the author of the recent Broadway productions “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Hillary and Clinton,” to write a play about her ordeal, but he resisted until he came across a unique way of presenting the play literally in her own words. The process began by having a neutral party, Steve Cosson, artistic director of the New York investigative theater company the Civilians, interview Higginbotham. The recordings serve as the play’s text.
Each night on stage a technician connects actress Deirdre O’Connell’s microphone and ear buds through which she will hear an edited version of the interviews as she lip-syncs Higginbotham’s words. “Dana H.,” directed by Les Waters, is a Goodman Theatre co-production with Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group, where O’Connell debuted her performance in June.
Playwright Lisa Kron has said O’Connell, who was last seen locally in Steppenwolf Theatre’s 2014 staging of Mona Mansour’s “The Way West,” is one of those actresses who “allow you to write complicated things because they can do complicated things.”
With praise like that, O’Connell seems the perfect choice for this unconventional performance, but she admits her answer wasn’t an immediate “yes.”
“It took me a minute to get my mind around whether I wanted to be this experiment of learning something this precisely while being tethered to someone else’s voice and its every nuance,” O’Connell explains in a phone conversation from upstate New York, where she was taking a break before the Chicago opening. “I was worried that I would feel claustrophobic. Plus would I be any good at it? But I was intrigued by the challenge.”
O’Connell spent this past January-May learning the script. She came at it from every angle she could think of. She learned it on the page like a regular script; she videotaped herself; she learned to not use her own voice.
“It was a lengthy and arduous project. It’s like doing magic tricks. I had to make the illusion complete. I got closer and closer and finally I could do it.”
O’Connell did not view videotape of the original interviews with Higginbotham, so she was free to instinctually add her own facial expressions and body language to the performance.
“There are subtle differences from performance to performance,” she says. “All of this was never locked down, and that makes it a pleasure because I am finding it as I go every time.”
There was a disconnect and loneliness that Higginbotham experienced during her ordeal that also finds its way into O’Connell’s psyche when she’s performing the role. By the end of the Los Angeles run, she says she experienced a strange reaction to it all.
“I loved doing it more, but it was harder to do, and I had never experienced something like that where both were true,” she says. “I think it’s harder because it became more vivid to me and more alive to me. And at the same time, because I had done it for so long that I could surrender to it more so, the visceral pleasure was there, too.”
At the Los Angeles opening, O’Connell finally met Higginbotham, who was seeing the show for the first time. While it was “a scary night for both of us,” she feels Higginbotham’s reaction was very positive to the work and performance.
“I think the piece is doing what it was meant to do for her. In some ways, I hope it helps release her into the world a little bit and make it a less lonely place that she’s been left in.”
Note: The Goodman Theatre’s website states the following: Recommended for ages 16+ for dark themes and vivid descriptions of violence.
Mary Houlihan is a local freelance writer.
