“Rabbit Hole” burrows into audience’s emotions
A single light illuminates a couple sitting at a kitchen table. Holding hands, they both stare with a haggard, grimly-determined expression into a spot beyond the stage. As the lights fade, their silhouettes remain.
“Rabbit Hole,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning play written by David Lindsay-Abaire, premiered at Utah State University on Tuesday at the Fine Arts Center. It was a play about “grief, but more a play about a family trying to find love through the hard time of this grief,” said director Jason Spelbring.
The play revolves around Howie and Becca Corbett, a married couple experiencing the aftermath of the death of their only son, Danny. Neither parent is able to cope well in the beginning. Becca tries to get rid of or put away anything that reminds her of Danny, while Howie is unwilling to part with anything that belonged to their son.
While incorporating a simplistic cast of Becca’s mother, Nat, Becca’s sister, Izzy, and Jason, the driver of the car that ran over and killed Danny, emotions build and ebb throughout the play. Sarina Mountcastle, a freshman majoring in music education and biological anthropology, said her boyfriend was in the play, and she came prepared with tissues in hand.
“Seeing it all put together, and not just him, was a lot more dramatic than I thought it was going to be,” Mountcastle said. “You know, a lot more powerful. It really showed family problems.”
In order to recuperate from the emotions exhibited during his performance, actor Kenny Bordieri, a junior who portrays the character Howie, said he has multiple ways to shake off the emotion.
“I cook,” Bordieri said. “I like to go home, and I like to cook a ridiculous amount of food. I don’t always eat all of it. I cook for the week and that’s a good outlet. I go in my car and listen to music or I go out and meet with people. There’s nothing worse than being alone after a traumatic experience, which is hopefully what I’m having every night on stage.”
But the play is not without humor, Spelbring said.
“There are moments where the family laughs together,” Spelbring said. “There are moments in tense situations where a character says something and lightens it up. It’s just them sort of navigating through this new maze of loss.”
In order to illustrate the play’s complex weave of emotions, cast members engaged in preparations well in advance. Brendon Henderson, a freshman who portrays Jason in the play, said he read through the script in October and began collecting police reports and school records in a binder and viewing them in the role of Jason.
“You play a normal teenager, who is on the brink of adulthood, on his way to college,” Henderson said. “I can relate to that. It’s really just looking at these characters that aren’t much different than you. The way I look at is, you don’t ever want to become the character. What you want to be is a vessel of the character saying what it is that they want to say.”
Further preparation for the play was dedicated to perfecting the smallest details. From creating Danny’s robot comforter to an authentic private school badge obtained from New Rochelle, New York, for Henderson’s character, properties manager Trevor Flocco said care was taken to promote the play’s reality.
“One of actors goes through four beers in this show,” Flocco said. “I asked him what specifically he thought his character would drink and he said ‘Sam Adams Boston Lager.’ Also, I had the actresses and actors (have) specific things in mind that they had already or asked me to find. And just going to the grocery store to find certain juices that look like wine.”
The amount of preparation put into the play to create a pseudo-reality also influenced the lives of the actors.
“As a person, it’s made me reevaluate my relationship with my family members,” Bordieri said, “and if something were to happen, would I be happy with the last thing I said to them?”
— katherine.l.larsen@gmail.com