After a long absence due to COVID, Broadway is slowly starting to come back. But the majority of new productions are not the typical Main Stem fare of jukebox musicals, revivals, or tuners based on popular movies. Most recent openings have been transfers or returns of unconventional Off-Broadway offerings. Two of them, Is this a Room and Dana H., playing in repertory after award-winning runs at the Vineyard Theater, are derived from transcripts of recordings of real people living frightening events. These unusual evenings are both short (only 70 minutes each) and small-scale with simple sets, but pack an enormous wallop.
Dana H., Lucas Hnath’s gripping work, is based on interviews with his mother who was kidnapped for five months by a dangerous criminal when she was working as a counselor at a psychiatric hospital. Deirdre O’Connell performs the extraordinary feat of lip-synching Dana’s dialogue with the unseen interviewer Steve Cosson. This remarkable acting accomplishment is much more than a gimmick. You gradually forget that O’Connell is speaking to a pre-recorded track as her body language and eloquent features convey the tumult of Dana’s ordeal.
She becomes Dana and Andrew Boyce’s generic motel room set turns into her hell of captivity through O’Connell’s three-dimensional limning. Hnath, along with audio editor and sound designer Mikhail Fiksel, has stitched together pieces of the interview to create a tapestry of terror that enmeshes you and doesn’t let go, not even after the lights come up. Les Waters’s straightforward staging adds to the almost unbearable tension. A sequence in the latter part of the play is shattering in its ordinariness, given the circumstances that precede it. No spoilers, but be ready for its impact.
