Blackbird
Here a collection from material to the play “Blackbird” :
25 – July – 2009 – Time Out
Blackbird: a dissenting view by John Beer
Victory Gardens’ current production of David Harrower’s Blackbird has been greeted with nearly universal acclaim. And news of its extension to August 9 was enough to melt down the theater’s reservation system. I made the trek to the Biograph Theater on Wednesday (the anniversary of John Dillinger’s death, no less) to see Billy Petersen and Mattie Hawkinson duel it out. But while I agree that the two actors turn in accomplished performances in arduous roles (and as set designer, Dean Taucher is no slouch, either), I found myself decidedly less enamored with Harrower’s play.
As you’ve probably heard, Blackbird (British slang for an ex-con) revolves around a sexual relationship between 56-year-old Ray (Petersen) and Una (Hawkinson), now 27, when she was 12. The topic is, to put it lightly, controversial; plenty of people find the very idea that Ray is portrayed as anything but a predatory monster intolerable. That doesn’t seem like a very productive stance toward the play, in my view. It’s not as though we need another contemporary bear-baiting exhibition like NBC’s vile To Catch a Predator, as exploitative an effort as one could imagine regarding the issue of child sexual abuse.
And to some degree, Blackbird is more effective in its delineation of the damage Ray’s done because it registers complexities. When Una, in the lengthy monologue that forms the core of the play, describes herself as happily waiting in a motel room for Ray, eager for “her man” to bring her chocolate, the detail is precise and heartbreaking. It’s the voice of a child who wants very badly to be fully grown, and as Hawkinson’s performance makes clear, Ray, by taking advantage of this desire, has left her marooned in childhood even as an adult.
What bothers me about Blackbird isn’t the complexities it offers, but what it lacks: in a word, drama. It’s not that Petersen and Hawkinson don’t get ample opportunity to show their vocal registers or throw things around. But the situation between the two characters is fundamentally undramatic—because there really isn’t anything for them to do about it. It’s not even clear that it make sense to talk about a shared situation. The events that matter have all happened fifteen years before Una shows up at Ray’s workplace. So, when the play ends without clear resolution, that doesn’t seem like Harrower’s artistic choice: it seems like his acknowledgement of the limits of his setup.
Those limits ultimately had three consequences for me as a viewer. First, since we’re given virtually nothing about this pair except for their relationship as abuser and abused, the play comes to seem more like a kind of case study of a particular kind of crime than a fully-fledged drama (maybe appropriate forCSI’s Petersen, but still disappointing). Second, the imbalance of power between the two characters, in setting up Una as, however enraged, still supplicant to Ray, who still gets to slip out of the room at the end, replicates the logic of the original abusive situation, but does so arbitrarily: Una’s left putting herself at Ray’s mercy again simply because that’s how the play sets it up. And it’s the conjunction of these aspects that makes the play feel exploitative to me. It purports on one level to give a clear-eyed examination of sexual abuse, but its lack of context and dramatic inertia leave it uncomfortably close to presenting the situation simply for our entertainment: uneasy entertainment, to be sure, but entertainment nonetheless.
July 2009 – Chicago Sun Times
Poetic ‘Blackbird’ draws us into its convoluted nest
You can understand why actors might easily be magnetized by Scottish playwright David Harrower’s play “Blackbird,” which received its Chicago debut Monday night at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater.
To begin with, Harrower’s language is alternately teasing and poetic — at once real and stilted in that deftly passive-aggressive manner of David Mamet. On top of this, there is the writer’s intriguing ability to capture real-time tension while simultaneously suggesting how it is so easily trumped by the far more potent, sensual time of memory. And then there is the way Harrower slyly recapitulates past behavior by creating similar actions and responses in the present moment. Certain aspects of character, he suggests, are rooted in our hard wiring.
Finally, there is the playwright’s sense of emotional entrapment in all its forms. After all, his play presents us with two profoundly troubled souls — Ray (William L. Petersen) and Una (Mattie Hawkinson — who have been wrestling with the fearsome ghost of the other for 15 years. Now, here they are in the same room, engaged in a long-delayed reckoning about a traumatic event they know can never be expunged from memory.
Yet director Dennis Zacek’s airtight production provoked this thought: While I completely understood why Una came to this room, I couldn’t quite believe Ray would not flee. But then again, perhaps he craved this exorcism of psychic garbage every bit as much as she did.
Ambivalence and ambiguity? Absolutely. They are built into the play. The question remains: Can you fully buy into the scenario? Is its mix of incendiary perversity and brutally honest sexual and emotional truths enough to hold you for 80 minutes? The answer is yes, but with some reservations.
The story — and it very much belongs to the young woman — is this: Ray was a 40-year-old neighbor of Una’s family when her parents invited him to a barbecue. She was 12 at the time — emotionally sophisticated in a mysterious way. They had a three-month “relationship” with a catastrophic outcome for both. Now, all these years later, she has found him again. Was it a one-time aberration for Ray? Even more unsettling, is Harrower suggesting this relationship was the big passion of both these people’s lives?
Hawkinson, a petite beauty of riveting intensity, is a knockout here. It isher play. Petersen, perhaps just a bit too warm and normal, lacks the creepiness factor. But perhaps that’s the point. You be the judge of that. But note: A surprise shift late in the play might alter your verdict.
Hedy Weiss
Scanns from theatre programm:
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3 – July – 2009 – William Petersen’s name is on the ‘Blackbird’ program
The reason? William Petersen, star of the CBS series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”
Petersen’s fame is also the reason tickets for the summer slot in the Victory Gardens season have been flying out the door, attracting audience members from all across the country to see the show. Or, more accurately, to see Petersen in the show.
Many of them will be in for a bit of a surprise.
Harrower’s “Blackbird” is, well, harrowing. It is a long way from the TV series. The plot of the play, first seen at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005 and then at New York’s Manhattan Theater Club in 2007, revolves around an older man and young woman discussing the fallout from an affair that took place 15 years previously, when he was 40 and she was 12 years old.
“This is not a fun character to play,” Petersen said, speaking from the condominium he owns in his home theater city. “This is not a fun character to be. It is a tough slog emotionally. It is not one of those plays that makes you want to greet the crowd afterwards and all go out for a beer. We’re just trying to survive here.”
Petersen’s opposite in the two-actor show is Chicago actress Mattie Hawkinson. “All my aunts and uncles are coming in from the West Coast because they are big ‘CSI’ fans,” Hawkinson said. “I had to warn them about the subject matter.”
That said, “Blackbird,” directed in Chicago by Dennis Zacek, has been critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. “It reminds me of Greek theater,” Hawkinson said. “The characters hash out a very long argument in a single room. And it is about desires that are a detriment to life.”
“It is a fraught love story in a way,” Petersen says. “It is not just about what is right and what is wrong. It is very real in many ways. And this is not a topic that allows us to bury our heads in the sand.”
Petersen well knows some of his fans won’t be expecting what they’re getting. “But that brings a lot of new people into the theater,” he said, “and that’s a good thing.”
18 – July – 2009 – From the Ledge
Having lived in Chicago for more than ten years now, summer in this city is all about the lakefront, outdoor festivals such as Ravinia and the Grant Park Music Festival, slow, lazy afternoons grilling with friends and sipping Coronas. The major arts groups in the city are either on hiatus, wrapping up their seasons, or putting on light, easy-on-the-eyes-and-on-the-brain fare. I don’t think there has been a recent summer where one of the big arts and culture news is all about the fact that one of the city’s major cultural institutions is presenting a provocative, complex, deeply uncomfortable but undeniably memorable work. Part of it is probably because a lot of people (especially the ones who aren’t familiar with his gritty, pre-stardom work in Chicago’s burgeoning off-loop theater scene in the 1970s) have been caught off-guard that CSI superstar William Petersen will take on material that goes to a very dark place, with surprising, and to some, disturbing, overtones of moral ambiguity. But I think most of it is due to the fact that we haven’t seen material as brilliant, as complicated, as gnawing as David Harrower’s Blackbird, winner of the 2007 Laurence Olivier Award, the British theater’s equivalent of the Tony Awards, Best New Play (besting a heavyweight group comprised of Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll, Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, and Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer), on a Chicago stage in a while. If there is one thing that should pull you away from summer’s airy distractions, it is to see Blackbird at Victory Gardens Theatre, assuredly directed by Artistic Director Dennis Zacek, the best local production I have seen so far this year. If for some inexcusable reason you are not able to see it, consider yourself culturally and artistically malnourished.
Blackbird, on the outset, seems like a simple play. There’s only one set, a sterile, nondescript, trash-filled conference room in a manufacturing plant or a similar-type office location. Except for the blackout near the end, there are hardly any lighting effects, just unfussy lighting. There are only two characters, Ray, now known as Peter (Petersen), a schlumpy, mid-level type manager in his 50s who works in this office, and the well-dressed, well-spoken, but tightly wound-up late-twentysomething woman who visits him, Una (Mattie Hawkinson). But Blackbird, and its emotions, its constructs, its stealth attack on our moral certainties, is far from simple – as the first couple of scenes play out, we realize that Ray and Una had an affair 15 years before when he was 40 and she was 12. After all that time, Una, for whatever reason, has sought Ray out and re-entered his life.
Like all great playwriting, Blackbird and Harrower doesn’t let us off easy. Unlike what some pretty boisterous commenters on Chris Jones’ blog seems to think (have they actually seen the play?), Harrower makes it clear that Ray was a predator, that he knew what he was doing, and that what he was doing constituted child abuse. I think the more ambiguous point that Harrower makes, and the one that is the most unsettling, is on Una’s purpose for actively seeking out Ray after all these years. Did she come to visit him at his workplace to carry out a delayed revenge scenario where his payback will be humiliation at the unmasking of the carefully re-built life he is now leading? Or did she come to seek closure, to finally be able to go adult head-to-adult head with the person who wrecked her life and to let pent-up recriminations and hurt gush forth? Or, more confoundingly, did Una come to see Ray in order to kindle, or gulp, re-kindle, a romantic relationship that she has been carrying the torch for (albeit a torch blazing with a lot of fury and hurt) all these years? Is there a possibility that there was, and there continues to be, some semblance of love, on her part? What kind of love is a child capable of, and in the same vein, that child’s adult self, given what she has gone through? Harrower’s brilliance is in raising this doubt in us, the audience, a doubt that challenges our moral concepts, pre, post, otherwise. This is what, for me, makes the play a shattering experience.
Una is definitely the crux of the moral arguments in the play, and it is a breathtakingly complex and terrifying character. Mattie Hawkinson, who I saw at the recent Goodman production of Rock’n’Roll, gives a blazingly indelible performance. While watching her, awestruck, I thought to myself, was this how the Chicago audiences in the 1970s felt when they were watching the young Joan Allen or the young Laurie Metcalf in the early Steppenwolf productions: full of certainty in the future acting superstardom of a brilliant, daring actress? I firmly believe that Hawkinson will be the next big thing in Chicago theater after this performance. The role is a daunting mega-rollercoaster of emotions, moving from fury to confusion to inquisition to hurt to tenderness in half and quarter beats, but Hawkinson brilliantly delivers. When she recounts that fateful day on the beach and the bed and breakfast room that Ray rented, she delicately but pointedly brings you into the 12 year old Una’s state of mind and point of view, which makes the recounting of the events and emotions more heartbreaking. I don’t think it’s easy to pull off an acting heist when William Petersen is around, but Hawkinson definitively, unapologetically does.
Which brings us to Petersen, the reason for the close-to-sold-out run at Victory Gardens where he got his Actor’s Equity card. He may be the celebrity that everyone is stampeding to the Biograph to see, but Ray is definitely a secondary character, more reactive and less emotionally volatile than Una. I’ve always admired him, but I admire him more now after this play for a couple of reasons: he unselfishly gives Hawkinson the opportunity to shine in the more difficult role, and he has taken on a complicated, and at times reprehensible, character to do so. I think this should have been Petersen’s triumphant return to Chicago theater, not the tepid Dublin Carol at Steppenwolf last winter. It is a terrific, nuanced performance, not as showy as Hawkinson’s, but also steadily moving across a continuum of emotions: guilt, anxiety, defensiveness, tenderness, sexual tension. The scene when he talks about going back to the bar after Una has wandered in looking for her “father” is devastating. Petersen’s performance also effectively raises another one of Harrower’s points: at what point can someone be called redeemed after committing such a heinous act – when can you say that someone has irrevocably atoned? It is an interesting angle which makes Ray the sexual deviant more grey shading than black and white tone…until the twist close to the end of the play where your perspectives on him are jarred once again. By choosing to appear in Blackbird instead of the myriad of other material at his disposal, some of them I’m sure more audience-pleasing, William Petersen’s comeback to the theater that formed him has enriched our city’s cultural life in one fell swoop.
20 – July – 2009 – Time Out
It may be Petersen’s TV fame that had some performances of this Chicago premiere selling out before it opened. But audiences who come for Gil Grissom will leave Mattie Hawkinson fans—the depth and precision of her performance is nothing short of breathtaking.
Hawkinson plays Una, a young woman who tracks down the man (Petersen) who, 15 years earlier, was her lover. Or rather, perhaps, her molester; at the time of their sexual encounters, he was 40 and she was 12. It’s that “perhaps” that makes Harrower’s play so confoundingly, uncomfortably complex. The playwright doles out with great care the details of the entanglement, its end and what’s ensued in the intervening years, before Una sees Ray’s photo by chance in a trade magazine; the play unfolds in real time as Una confronts Ray in his workplace’s break room.
The balance of power shifts often enough to make one nauseous; indeed, as the waves of recriminations crash back and forth, both Ray and Una reach the verge of physical illness. What may induce discomfort in those watching is the play’s emotional intricacy. It’s natural to want a clear moral denouncement of what was definitely abuse. But Harrower doesn’t allow us that ease: While neither blaming the victim nor letting the abuser off the hook, Blackbird whittles away at these two until we can’t help but see the affair the way they did—as a love story, albeit one that destroyed both their lives. Petersen crumples masterfully in Zacek’s tightly wound production, but it’s Hawkinson’s play. As you watch her crescendo in the long, riveting indictment of a monologue in which she recounts the last time she saw Ray, just heed our advice: Remember to breathe.
by Chris Vire
July 2009 – Chicago Free Press
Reviewed by Web Behrens
CFP contributor
Playwright David Harrower does his job, and then some, with “Blackbird,” an astonishingly complicated drama about sexual abuse that doesn’t absolve the abuser but doesn’t allow the audience to make pat assessments either. If art should make us think, well, Harrower accomplishes that easily; and although this is no feel-good show designed to lift up its audience, you thankfully won’t wander out of the Biograph feeling worse for the experience.
With echoes of “Lolita,” “Doubt” and “Oleanna” all resonating through the theater, Harrower nevertheless forges a story that stands up on its own—and delivers two intensely meaty roles for actors as well. Set entirely in the dirty, cluttered break room of some office building after hours, Una suddenly appears, a ghost from another life, to confront Peter about their past. Fifteen years ago, when he was a 40-year-old named Ray and she was only 12, they began an emotional entanglement that culminated in a seedy, inappropriate sexual encounter. It all ended (or so Ray thought) with his three-year prison term, but, Harrower indicates, such a life-shattering mistake can never truly be over.
Victory Gardens’ artistic ensemble deserves immense credit for pulling off such a complex work. Under Dennis Zacek’s wise direction, William Petersen and Mattie Hawkinson deliver brave and haunting performances without succumbing to scenery-chewing: There are very few tears here, and very little shouting. Just two people, both fully human, trying to make sense of their past and discern their future. They take us, the audience, to uncomfortable places—and an 11th-hour surprise further muddies the emotional waters. All in all, it’s a challenging and rewarding production that nests in your psyche.
14 – July – 2009 – National Examiner
Miles from CSI, William Petersen galvanizes as a pedophile in ‘Blackbird’
With the spare, riveting Blackbird, David Harrower does the near impossible: Tells a story that has you empathizing with a pedophile. Without ever diminishing the all-but unspeakably heinous gravity of the crime, Harrower humanizes the criminal, creating an anti-hero who has who is as loveable as he is horrible. You’ll ache for this man, while at the same time shuddering in fury.
People may flock to Blackbird on the strength of the marquee – CSI’s Bill Petersen stars. But they’ll leave shaken to the core by a character who bears no resemblance to Gil Grissom and a production directed to searing perfection by Dennis Zacek for the Victory Gardens Theater. There’s no doubt about guilt, or about the heinous nature of the crime at the broken heart of the story. This isn’t about a 20-year-old caught making out with a high school junior. It is about a 40-year-old man having sex multiple times over many months with a 12-year-old girl, the daughter of a friend.
When Blackbird opens, Ray (Petersen) is in his mid-50s, He has served years in prison for the crime, changed his name, and remade himself as a management cog in a dreary, nondescript supply company. When Una (Mattie Hawkinson, riveting as a survivor badly, indelibly scarred) shows up unexpectedly in the company’s filthy basement lunchroom (authentic down to the last Styrofoam container and overflowing trash can thanks to set designer Dean Taucher) , it’s as if the walls have started closing in. The oppressive weight of rage, irretrievable loss and irreparable injury becomes as palpable as the sticky candy wrappers underfoot and the barely audible hum of the Coke machine.
Much of the piece’s complexity lies in the sheer ordinariness of Petersen’s Ray. He isn’t some evil exotic or larger-than-life villain . He’s the working-class schlub you’d buy a beer for at the neighborhood pub, the neighbor who helps you dig your car out of the snow, far more Willy Loman than Hannibal Lecter. And there’s no equivocating the monstrosity of what he’s done.
Yet it’s not the descriptions of oral sex on a 12-year-old body or groping barely pubescent breasts in a public park that horrify the most. It’s the aftermath of these events.
“You left me alone. Bleeding. You left me. You left me in love,” Una says. It was a life sentence, making Ray’s six in prison (“Blackbird” is British slang for an ex-convict) years seem like a slap on the wrist. But as it turns out, and as Petersen makes so gut-wrenchingly vivid, Ray’s been living out his own life sentence. At least, that’s how it seems. The moral ambiguity of the piece is both brilliant and shattering. Can unforgivable crimes be committed with integrity, and even love?
Then there’s this wholly disquieting truth, disgorged as Ray and Una resurrect their devastating past:
“Adults lie. They don’t even know they’re doing it.”
It’s a sentence of bone-truth, and one that throws everything we’ve learned about Ray into question.
Harrower then ups the stakes further still. In the final moments of the production, he brings in a third character whose entrance elicited an audible, justifiable shock from the opening night audience.
Just before that final, hellishly ambiguous revelation, Harrower creates a prolonged, scene that is almost unbearably awful. Not awful in the sense that the play is lacking in any means – quite the polar opposite. It is a scene so excruciatingly tense the very atmosphere seems about to snap into a thousand razor-edged shards.
Surely the bogey man – the terror that has been quietly, unmistakably accruing for so long – is about to engulf these characters we’ve come to care so deeply for, and destroy them like a wolf ripping the heart from a lamb. It’s the stuff of panic attacks and sudden suffocation. It is also illustrative of the unnerving, tragic power of Blackbird.
Catey Sullivan
Blackbird continues through Aug. 16 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets are $30 – $58. For more information, call 773/871-3000, click here or go to www.victorygardens.org.
“Blackbird” opened last night at the Victory Gardens Theatre starring William Petersen and Mattie Hawkinson. This is British playwright David Harrower’s raw and provocative two person drama about the destructive cycle of desire and illicit love. Victory Gardens Artistic Director and all-around good guy, Dennis Zacek, directs “Blackbird” which won the 2007 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, which is Britain’s equivalent of the Tony.
I admit I am not a fan of dramas and prefer to escape in light hearted musicals like “Mary Poppins” but I must say this play gave me goose bumps and kept me on the edge of my seat. The Associated Press says it is “a fascinating and unnerving 90 minute cat and mouse tale of revenge and sexual intrigue, with genuine theatricality and undeniable shock value.” I concur wholeheartedly. The play has no intermissions during the 90 minutes and when the last heart breaking words are uttered, you don’t realize that the time has flown by!
“Blackbird” is the British vernacular for “jailbird” and the story revolves around the awkward reunion of Ray and Una 15 years after a passionate affair when he was 40 and she was a minor. In the end, “Blackbird” will leave the audience stunned. I promise.
Performances run through August 9th at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago. Tickets are $30- $58 and can be purchased by calling the box office (773) 871-3000 or online at www.victorygardens.org
Welcome Home Billy!
