"Rabbit Hole' at the Arden

There's a club to which no one wants to belong, and which, having joined, you can never leave. Adam and Eve were the founding members, courtesy of Cain. You'd be surprised, if Fate hasn't signed you up, how large a club it is, and how many kinds of pain it holds.

Losing a child was, not long ago, a common and even predictable event, as in some parts of the world it still is. In the early modern West, only half of all live births reached maturity.

That's not to say parents didn't grieve just as we do; Lear and Cordelia are proof enough of that. But there was a certain economy of suffering. Life and death were too close together, and producing life itself was, for mothers, a mortal hazard.

It's otherwise now, with single-child families almost the norm in developed countries. Losing an only child in such circumstances is devastating in ways earlier generations wouldn't have experienced, at least typically. Yet dramatic literature on the subject is sparse. David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole, winner of a 2007 Pulitzer Prize, is an honorable exception.

Beneath the surface

The play opens with younger sister Izzy (Julianna Zinkel) chattering away at big sister Becca (Grace Gonglewski), while the latter dices food. It's a perfectly chipper domestic scene, until Izzy's revelation of her pregnancy tips us to the fact that Becca and spouse Howie (Brian Russell) have recently lost their four-year-old son Danny, killed by an auto while chasing his dog. Izzy is a trial, and mother Nat (Janis Dardaris), who mourns the suicide of her son, seems willfully tactless and equally needy.

Becca and Howie, meanwhile, try to cope. An extra wrinkle is thrown in by Jason (Aaron Stall), the teenage driver of the car, who confusedly reaches out to the bereaved couple and complicates their already strained relationship.

This relationship is the heart of the play. Becca and Howie are thoroughly decent people trying to get their arms around a ball of pain too large to be embraced and too heavy to lift. This leaves them futilely trying to reach each other.

Conflicting reactions to death

Lindsay-Abaire has neatly— perhaps too neatly— set their reactions in symmetrical opposition to one another. Becca wants to expunge all trace of little Danny from her house, and then insists on selling the house altogether. Howie wants as desperately to cling to the old décor, and he keeps Danny's room as a shrine. When Jason shows up one day he reacts violently, although Becca is receptive to the teenager. That might imply that she's symbolically replacing Danny and will want a new child, but Becca rejects the idea with equal violence when Howie suggests it.

As this interlude might indicate, Becca and Howie are caught up in a binary opposition. Each regards the other's grieving as offensive and inappropriate. They treat each other with tenderness and regard— the fatal limitation of decency— but they can find no point of common ground. In fact, they are not simply finding their separate ways to grieve, but turning, step by step, from each other.

There is no one to blame— not even the hapless Jason— but blame must be cast for a world made so suddenly terrible and empty. What Becca and Howie cannot get at is the unassuageable anger they feel toward each other, and which they cannot face because it's both necessary and unjustified.

And in real life…

In real-life situations such as this, marriages often do break up. Some couples can work their way through their trouble and swallow the damages; some cannot. Sometimes there's a cathartic moment that tips the balance one way or the other; sometimes nothing will suffice but the slow passage of time. Lindsay-Abaire opts for the second strategy, which is perhaps the riskier one dramatically, since it's the more difficult one to make credible.

To balance the repressed emotions of the protagonists, Izzy and Nat are given characters who act out their feelings directly. This tactic provides some comic relief, but it also defeats any deeper interaction and threatens at times to reduce the play to a sitcom level. Only at the end is Nat given the opportunity to help her daughter, and the two women don't so much touch the other's pain as confront each other with it.

Strengths and limitations

The cast is all fine, including newcomer Aaron Stall. Jim Christy's direction is sensitive both to the play's strength and its limitations. You want to see Becca break down and Howie blow up, but that ain't gonna happen, honey, except momentarily.

Perhaps more emotion could have come through the play's strictures, especially in Brian Russell's performance as Howie. But in a theater where cheap gestures and easy displays abound, there is something to be said for deliberate restraint.

As I say: This is a club you don't want to join.