Danny and the Deep Blue Sea

WingSpan Theater Company opened Danny and the Deep Blue Sea on October 27, 2005 at the Bath House Cultural Center. It is a mediocre early effort by John Patrick Shanley who went on five years later to win the Oscar in 1988 for his original screenplay of "Moonstruck."

First performed as a staged reading in 1983 at the National Playwrights Conference at the O'Neill Center, the play received its professional debut in February 1984 at Actors Theater of Louisville and moved to Circle in the Square in New York on June 6, 1984.

Two losers, Roberta, 31, and Danny, 29, meet in a deserted bar in the Bronx. Both are professed loners, each aching to connect with somebody -- anybody. Both are extremely paranoid and have hair-trigger tempers. They have each created their own delusional world.

Roberta invites Danny home to spend the night -- surprise!? They pour out their hearts to each other in a limited vocabulary. In the short time it takes to perform a play of 32 pages, the "F" word is invoked 54 times.

Expertly directed by WingSpan Artistic Director, Susan Sargeant, and well-acted by Clay Yocum and Heather Henry (though they both need to learn to speak, and not yell their lines, especially in the Bath House's intimate black box) and a well-designed set by Wade Giampa, if you plugged up your ears and just concentrated on the set design, movement and emotional force of the actors, you would experience a fine 80 minutes of theater.

Although Danny and the Deep Blue Sea aspires to trenchant drama, Wingspan's production got an unintentional (at least I think it was unintentional) ripple of laughter from the audience of 14 people resulting from the following dialogue while Danny and Roberta were complimenting each other on their respective features:

Roberta: Your hair! Your hair is very sexy!
Danny: Shut-up.
Roberta: Very sexy. (As she makes a big deal of stroking his 'hair.') Cause it's like strong and soft at the same time, and it feels good when you touch it.

Reason for the laughter: Yocum has a shaved head and is bald as a cue. Talk about comic relief! The best thing about this play is its brevity.