Home    History    Company    On Stage    New Season    New Directions    Photos    Join us    Email

On Stage

Travis Reiff and Jennifer Toohey give strong performances in the Alliance Theatre Lab's production of "Danny and the Deep Blue Sea"

Soul Porn

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea rubs your face in life's icky contradictions, and you love it.

By Brandon K. Thorp 

Published: December 6, 2007

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea was a last-minute addition to the Alliance Theatre Lab's season. It was an economics thing, apparently. Danny's got two actors and almost no set, so it's easy to produce. Actually it's probably easy in all respects: easy to direct, easy to star in. John Patrick Shanley didn't flinch while writing Danny more than 25 years ago. It feels like the work of a young playwright greedily plundering the darkest depths of human potential, in love with his own ability to say things other playwrights didn't say and illuminate situations uglier than most playwrights would dare examine. The protagonists, Danny and Roberta, are candy for actors and directors eager to show how hard they can punch. Yet Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is, among other things, about a woman whose life may have been ruined when she gave her father a blowjob. So no matter how easy it is to stage, a play like this one shouldn't be easy to watch. Yet it always is, and that might be a problem.

A weird problem. To point it out is to grouse about having too much fun. Aside from sounding curmudgeonly, the gripe begs the question: If you aren't going to the theater at least partially to have a good time, why go at all? To explore human nature? Plenty of folks will say so, but Danny might give the lie to that noble idea. Blowjobs for daddy, lives in tatters, a dude who can't stop fistfighting and might have killed somebody — Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is about all of this, but it's more funny than sad, and that's nuts.

The play begins as a fly-on-the-wall view of two very broken people sitting at a bar. Roberta forces Danny to chat. He doesn't want to — he's more into bloodying than bonding — but it happens. Danny goes home with Roberta; they have sex. The next morning, they have to deal with each other, to bring the previous night into sync with their ordinary lives.

Dramatic, right? But what gives Danny its spark and keeps eyes glued to the stage is how entertainingly fucked up its protagonists are. Sure, we all have our own little traumas; we all know somebody who's worse off than we are, but even that person is a paragon of mental health next to Danny and Roberta. They are somehow a source of delight and mirth.

Danny enters the first scene a mess: His jeans are torn, his hands bandaged. He's not even sure he wants to talk about it with Roberta — he's half-convinced he'd rather break her nose — but he goes with it, maybe just for a change of pace. The other night, he relates, when brawling with a bunch of guys at a party, he pounded a man nonstop for 10 minutes, even after the man had stopped fighting back. Danny continued to stomp on his chest, and heard something break. Now he thinks the guy might be dead. This is heavy, even for Danny, who is at least partially aware he's got problems.

Roberta seems to relish the opportunity to chat with somebody damaged enough not to judge her for her daddy issue. Danny is the first person she's ever told. The greed with which she goes after the reticent stranger is scary. When he finally assaults her, after much provocation, she responds to his chokehold by croaking, "Harder!"

There's real pleasure in all of this, but it's a pornographic pleasure. We shouldn't watch. We should avert our eyes.

Happily there is also dramatic pleasure — technical and aesthetic. It's rare to see a perfectly cast actor at work; Travis Reiff couldn't be better. He's not a big guy, but here he's almost hulking. He's twitchy but muscular, like an angry pig rooting around for something, and also human. No matter what his body and face are up to, his eyes always communicate a trapped native intelligence horrified by what it's been forced to witness. As Roberta, Jennifer Toohey is almost as good, animated by need and the sudden exhilaration of meeting somebody who might understand her, and whom she can understand.

Watching such damaged people enacted so convincingly by good actors might be pornographic, but there's something kind of wonderful about it too: It allows the dregs to seem human. If you were in the bar with Danny and Roberta, you wouldn't talk to them — you'd move to a distant table or leave the place. At the theater, you stick around and watch, and mortification gives way to compassion (though, thanks to Shanley's instinctive dislike of the maudlin, never to pity). The wretches in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea don't afford us any of the aforementioned guilty, smug self-satisfaction ordinarily derived from encounters with very damaged people. The play lets us see too much of Danny and Roberta for that.

The exposure makes us hope they'll find some way to help each other, and makes us believe they can. That's nice — for us, them, and everybody. If we are titillated by blood and guts, that doesn't mean we can't be better people.

 

THEATER

Few props, but powerful acting

A celebrated playwright's talent shines in the Alliance production of an early work about the healing power of love.

Posted on Mon, Dec. 03, 2007

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

Travis Reiff and Jennifer Toohey give strong performances in the Alliance Theatre Lab's production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.

Love hurts. For Danny and Roberta, right-around-30 working-class people from the Bronx, it hurts as much as the rest of life. But in John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, love does more: It begins a much-needed healing.

The Bronx-born Shanley, who won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in drama for Doubt (a play that will inaugurate the Caldwell Theatre Company's $10-million Count de Hoernle Theatre in Boca Raton next weekend), got his start as a playwright in the early 1980s. He became a certified hot writer when his 1987 Moonstruck screenplay won the Oscar, but his talent and style were already clear when he crafted Danny and the Deep Blue Sea in 1983.

The Alliance Theatre Lab, a small professional company that performs at the Main Street Playhouse in Miami Lakes, has just opened its season with a minimalist -- yet potent -- revival of Shanley's early play.

The drama, which premiered at 1984's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville (with John Turturro as Danny), is a volatile yet hopeful pas de deux for a man and a woman knocked around by life.

ANGER PROBLEM

Danny (Travis Reiff) has an anger problem the way Hollywood party girls have a sobriety problem. He moves through the world ready to explode, ready to pound on anyone and everyone. His co-workers call him ``the Beast.''

Roberta (Jennifer Toohey) is drifting through her days, leaving the raising of the 12-year-old son she had as an unmarried 18-year-old to her parents. She has a secret, one involving her father; it torments her, ruining her sleep and killing any wisp of self-esteem she might have had.

The two meet in a crummy bar, Danny just in from his latest fight. He has an open wound on his forehead, a cloth wrapped around his aching, bloodied hand. He exudes antagonism. Not the kind of guy a woman would try to chat up.

But Roberta does.

So begins an unlikely relationship that will take them through the night and into the new day. Their torments play out through shared stories, confessions, violence. But each has a romanticism buried under the layers of emotional scarring. And that plays out, too.

BARE-BONES STAGING

Alliance artistic director Adalberto J. Acevedo has given Danny a bare-bones staging: A wooden platform with the audience on either side serves as the barroom floor and the little room where Roberta lives. A couple of tables and a few chairs, a mattress, a bottle of wine, a doll dressed as a bride -- that's it, as far as props and ''furniture'' go. But with Reiff and Toohey as his actors, Acevedo doesn't need more.

Reiff makes Danny's volatility genuinely dangerous, while still communicating the character's damaged soul and, finally, his tenderness. Toohey matches his toughness and vulnerability. Both let you know that, as far as long-term redemption goes, this may well be an early Bronx fairy tale from Shanley.

But for this night, from this play, salvation seems possible.

Past Productions




              

THEATER REVIEW

Alliance Theatre Lab puts on a winner

BY MARTA BARBER

mbarber@miamiherald.com

Related Content

If you go

What: Burn This by Lanford Wilson

Where: Alliance Theatre Lab, Main Street Playhouse, 6766 Main St., Miami Lakes

When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturday; 5 p.m. Sunday; runs through April 22

Cost: $25 adults, $15 seniors, $10 students

Information: www.thealliancetheatrelab.com or 305-567-2721

Ever since Burn This opened in 1987, Lanford Wilson's funny and emotional play has attracted big-name actors such as John Malkovich, Joan Allen, Catherine Keener and Edward Norton to play the lead roles of Anna and Pale.

Anna, a dancer with a quiet and artistic soul, and Pale, a volatile brute, are the proverbial opposites with a strong attraction. The roles are an actor's dream, with just the right amount of grip to prove you've got the right stuff.

Alliance Theatre Lab, the Miami Lakes company that just finished its first year of operation, has cast the talented Elise Girardin and Travis Reiff as Anna and Pale, and they sizzle.

Anna is mourning the loss of her roommate, Robbie, who died in a freakish boating accident along with Robbie's lover, Dom. Anna's longtime lover, Burton (Robert Younis), has come to her Manhattan apartment to console her.

Burton, a sci-fi screenwriter, is rich and dull, and his marriage proposals have long been ignored.

Anna's other roommate is Larry, a gay ad executive played hilariously by Christopher Kauffmann.

Pale, Robbie's brother, storms into the apartment a month after the funeral, claiming all of Robbie's belongings. The rest is, well, if not history, fodder for two hours of exhilarating, funny theater.

Directed by Adalberto Acevedo, who is also the artistic director of the company, this production of Burn This blends well the play's intense dramatic moments and its almost continuous humor.

Because of Kauffmann's perfect comedic timing and delivery, the director leans on the lighter angles of the play, making sure you're not overtaken by its heavier side. Thus you miss a bit of the fact that both Anne and Pale are going through inner struggles.

Girardin, a professional dancer, is ideally suited for the role, and her native Australian accent is not even noticed. Reiff is just a bull in his role as the vulgar and provocative Pale, and contrasts perfectly with the soft Anna.

If there is one weak spot in the cast it is Younis as the bland Burton. But the role is also meant to blend in.

Designed by Rachel Finley, the set, which occupies a large portion of one end of the black-box space, is simple but well utilized.

Alliance Theatre Lab is obviously a company with a small purse, but with Burn This it proves it has a large heart.

             

A powerful, electrifying work by the playwright whom many regard as our theatre's finest living writer. Presented both in Los Angeles and on Broadway to critical and popular acclaim, the play probes deeply and with great dramatic and comic effect into the lives of its singular characters.
"Quite simply, Lanford Wilson's BURN THIS is superb writing transformed into brilliant theatre…" —Drama-Logue.

"BURN THIS is Lanford Wilson's masterpiece." —LA Herald Examiner.

"Broadway has finally gotten masterfully into its stride with a new American play—BURN THIS…" —NY Post.

 

THE STORY: The place is a Manhattan loft shared by Anna, a lithe young dancer-choreographer, and her two gay roommates—her collaborator, Robby, who has just been killed in a freak boating accident, and Larry, a world-weary, caustically funny young advertising executive. As the play begins Anna is recovering from attending Robby's funeral, comforted by her wealthy, well-meaning boyfriend, Burton, a sci-fi screenwriter whose persistent proposals of marriage Anna finds herself unable to accept. Then, with sudden, unexpected explosiveness, Robby's older brother, Pale, bursts on the scene. He has come to collect his brother's belongings—but stays on to transform the action of the play and the lives of those in it. Menacing, profane, dangerous and yet oddly sensitive, Pale is both terrifying and fascinating and, in the end, the one who brings to Anna the unsettling but compelling love that, despite her fears and doubts, she cannot turn away.

Main Street Playhouse
6766 Main Street
Miami Lakes, FL 33014

Please call 305-567-2721
for tickets and information