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William Petersen returns to Chicago to star in Blackbird
By Edith McCauley, Theater Critic
William Petersen last performed at Victory Gardens Theater in 1998 and returns to appear in David Harrower’s Blackbird, a gripping work based on the premise of the questions and complications of child abuse. As the founder of Remains Theater Ensemble, he was active in Chicago, later becoming familiar to many as the star of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on television. He serves as executive producer and was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for his starring role in that series.
Petersen, as Ray, is confronted by Una, played by Mattie Hawkinson, 15 years after a devastating relationship that changed their lives forever. Una, at 12, becomes sexually involved when Ray attends a neighborhood gathering at her home. His kindness to her becomes much more, and throughout the 90-minute intensity of their widely-different memories of the situation, we have very mixed interpretations of the whole affair. Her accusations of abuse are often combined with her protestations of love and anger for his desertion following a sexual encounter.
Ray, having served a prison sentence, has begun a new life and proclaims his success in the world of business, but questions remain. Harrower’s dialogue comes across almost as poetry. Statements and responses of a few words, sometimes only one, take great concentration. Victory Gardens uses a wall next to the stage as a screen for the hearing impaired, so every word is visual as well as oral. At times, it created a distraction.
Petersen and Hawkinson, directed by Artistic Director Dennis Zacek, are beautifully cast. Both characters engender sympathy, and we leave not sure how it all began or where the future lies. At the talk-back following last week’s performance, the audience of mostly seniors saw the story as one of abuse of a child. It did not seem that simple to me.
Harrower’s choice of title, Blackbird, is a British term for jailbird, but in the context of this play could have multiple meanings. Opening July 13, it has played to sold-out houses, and tickets are at a premium. We were fortunate to call 15 minutes after six seats became available. For ticket information, call (773) 871-3000, or go online to: tickets@victorygardens.org. There has been an extension, so, like me, you may be in luck.
In David Harrower’s Blackbird, It’s Complicated
He’s not just a pedophile, and she’s not just his victim.
By Albert Williams
The first thing you hear in Victory Gardens Theater’s Blackbird is the sound of an acoustic guitar—a gentle prelude to the fireworks to come. There’s no vocal, but the song—Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” from the Beatles’ 1968 White Album—is instantly recognizable, and its words float in your head: “Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly . . . into the light of the dark black night.”
Una and Ray, the principal characters in this unremittingly intense 80-minute one-act by Scottish playwright David Harrower, are birds with broken wings—psychologically crippled by an episode that left both their lives in tatters. She’s 27, he’s 56, and they’ve had a brief affair—about 15 years earlier, when he was 40 and she was 12. They haven’t seen each other since Ray was sent to prison for statutory rape (”blackbird” is British slang for “jailbird”). Una has endured a lifetime of being “talked about, pointed at, stared at,” while Ray has done his time, changed his name, moved to a new city, and rebuilt his life. Now called Peter, he’s the manager of a medical-supplies manufacturing firm. Una, who’s found him after stumbling across his photo in a trade magazine in her doctor’s office, has him cornered in the littered lunchroom of his workplace. But why? To accuse him? Humiliate him? Attack him? Hurt him? Kill him? Or to rekindle the relationship?
Blackbird debuted in 2005 at the Edinburgh International Festival before moving to London’s West End and winning the Laurence Olivier Award for best new play. Now receiving its Chicago premiere at Victory Gardens, with William L. Petersen as Ray and Mattie Hawkinson as Una, it’s the work of a very skillful writer. Like David Mamet and Harold Pinter, Harrower knows how to distill the fractured syntax, half-completed sentences, stuttering repetitions, and pregnant pauses of conversation into a stark, stylized, nerve-jangling poetry. He knows how to heighten tension with dramatically well-timed interruptions—a phone that rings at an awkward moment, an unwanted knock on the door—and startling outbursts of violent action. And he knows how to leave questions unresolved. Like Oleanna, Mamet’s tale of a middle-aged college teacher’s disastrous encounter with a female student, or Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s portrait of a nun who suspects a priest of child molestation, Blackbird allows—even forces—audience members to impose their own interpretations on the events they’ve seen.
As Una and Ray retrace the events that led to their “three-month stupid mistake,” Harrower questions whether Una is more traumatized by the affair or by its aftermath—her parents’ fury, the intrusive medical exams, the guilt-inducing sessions with a soft-spoken psychiatrist who asked her why she hurt people who loved her, the trial, the media, the gossip. Exploring the blurry line between passion and perversion, love and abuse, Blackbird suggests that intimate relationships between adults and minors are taboo not because they’re abnormal but because they’re all too natural. Ray insists he’s not one of “those sick bastards” who gets off on underage girls; his desire for Una arose from an inappropriate but sincere affection. And Una was no Nabokovian nymphet, but an average pubescent girl drawn to a mature man who, unlike most other adults, didn’t treat her like a kid.
This compelling play demands complete commitment and honesty from its actors while testing their memory and concentration to the limit. In Dennis Zacek’s thoughtful, beautifully paced staging, every moment counts, as each answer raises new questions and each flash of insight raises the drama’s emotional stakes, building to a shocking final twist. Petersen’s haunting Ray—a man torn simultaneously by guilt and a lingering, aching passion—perfectly balances Hawkinson’s blistering, surgically precise Una, whose life is a constant, quietly desperate struggle with panic, depression, anger, and longing. Watching this duo warily face off, then relax to the point where they can share water from the same plastic bottle, is like watching two hostile animals as approach the same water hole. Lit by Jesse Klug, Dean Taucher’s lunchroom set comes complete with folding metal chairs, card tables, headache-inducing fluorescent lights, and garbage cans filled to overflowing with junk-food wrappers and soft-drink cans—a perfect metaphor for the emotional mess Ray has spent a lifetime trying to dispose of.
Blackbird dissects pedophilia but also transcends that subject, finding universality in extreme circumstances. Anyone who’s ever tried to revisit a failed relationship—a broken love affair, a marriage that ended in bitter divorce, a childhood with abusive parents—will understand the challenge Una and Ray face as they sort through the secrets and self-deceptions, trying to comprehend the past so they can move forward into the light of the dark black night.
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Mattie Hawkinson wipes the floor with William Petersen in ‘Blackbird’
Mattie Hawkinson (Una) confronts William Petersen (Ray) about a sexual affair they had 15 years ago.
William Petersen fans beware, ‘Blackbird’ is a long way from ‘CSI’ (posted July 5)
In the new Victory Gardens production of David Harrower’s harrowing “Blackbird,” a Chicago actress named Mattie Hawkinson wipes the floor with William Petersen, star of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and the name above the title on the infamous Biograph Theatre marquee.
Actually, that doesn’t adequately describe it. In a career-making performance, at once determined, vulnerable, nuanced and primal, Hawkinson tosses Petersen into the garbage. This destruction reduces Petersen to a shaking, eye-rubbing, terrified, spiteful, hollow-eyed, self-loathing piece of jelly.
And that is greatly to his credit. Few high-profile stars of TV procedurals would return to an intense, unforgiving Chicago stage for such a public battering and meltdown, especially in service of a play that revolves around a young woman named Una, who shows up at the workplace of her former lover, Ray, ready to confront him with the sexual affair the couple had 15 years ago. When he was 40 and she was 12.
“Backbird,” which began at the Edinburgh International Festival and caused something of a critical sensation when it showed up in London in 2007, is one of the best British plays of the decade. Its qualities are myriad, but many of them flow from the sparse intensity of Harrower’s writing, and his clear-eyed ability to explore all of the facets of such a poisonous relationship and its consequences without ever justifying or rationalizing what went on between a messed-up middle-age man and a needy almost-adolescent in a little seaside guesthouse.
This is a play about a sexual predator and his prey. One never doubts that. But Harrower also dares to look at all sides. And because he is willing to explore how the victim of such a crime must live with a complex stew of feelings—revolving around her own identity and a perverse longing for the man who caused such trauma—“Blackbird” ends up as a far deeper condemnation of such a selfish act than the typical two-dimensional treatments that have long dominated the dramatic depiction of this most disturbing of subjects.
The less you know in advance about exactly what Una does to Ray in the break room of his workplace, the better. She tells us early on that she wanted to stamp out his eyes. He tells her she is “some kind of ghost, turning up from nowhere to …”
This is a great script—and I don’t use that adjective lightly—because it shows us how a democratic society’s calibration is enhanced by fullness of ethical exploration. Indeed, “Blackbird” makes the case that an understanding of human complexity is a prerequisite for moral behavior. And, despite a subject that makes your skin crawl, it manages to spiral off into other gripping moral matters.
One ponders past mistakes and the likelihood of their sudden re-appearance. One ponders past assaults on oneself. And one starts to think about the trickiest issue within this particular area of jurisprudence: If a sexual predator claims a one-off transgression and pays a price of incarceration, can he ever be let off the hook? Can he ever be allowed to go about his business? Does he deserve to be hunted until he drops into his grave?
“Blackbird” has no answers. It recalls David Mamet’s “Oleanna” in its ambiguities (but not its sympathies), and also Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned To Drive” in its rich understanding of the journey faced by a victim of abuse. It also is very much its own beast.
Hawkinson has mostly played quirky comedic roles to date. She has never been cast here in anything quite like this. And under Dennis Zacek’s direction, she lobs lines, pleads, emotes, rages and, it feels, twists her entire body into the emotional pretzel that her character has become. Hollowed, callow and, as the play demands, pathetically sympathetic, Petersen, who digs far deeper than he did in “Dublin Carol” at Steppenwolf last year, takes you on the fullest of emotional journeys. You are right there with him, and you are also nowhere near him, which is exactly right.
“Blackbird,” which was produced in New York in 2007 with Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill, has not been Americanized well. Its setting still feels mostly British. But that’s a trivial flaw. There’s also a moment in this production—one involving the aforementioned garbage—that doesn’t feel fully earned. Trivial again.
This must-see show of the summer gets right pretty much everything that matters, beginning with a set from Dean Taucher that’s the best design I’ve seen in this particular theater. If it looks deceptively ordinary, look again. You could say that about the whole show.
Thanks to a pair of deeply gutsy performances and Zacek’s quietly courageous direction, “Blackbird” had the Victory Gardens audience fully in its claws at Monday night’s opening. At one wrenching moment, the whole theater seemed to let out a cry, almost in unison, but not quite.
Mattie Hawkinson wows audiences with her complex performances in ‘Blackbird’
Mattie Hawkinson plays Una (and William L. Petersen plays Ray) in Victory Gardens Theater’s “Blackbird.” (Courtesy of Victory Gardens Theater)
By Colleen Mastony Tribune reporter
Mattie Hawkinson’s soft voice takes on an edge as the actress tells me bluntly: “I did not want to be in a sexy rape play.”
We’re sitting backstage at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, where Hawkinson is starring in David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” a play that, she wants to make clear, is not some salacious take on sexual assault.
“There are so many plays written about this,” she says. “And so few of them are good.”
But “Blackbird” grabbed her attention from the moment she first read the script. In the 80-minute production, Hawkinson plays the part of Una, a 27-year-old woman who searches out and confronts the man who sexually abused her when she was 12 years old and he was 40. In the 15 years since, Una has been stuck, unable to move forward or back, tangled up in the memories and emotionally tethered to the man who hurt her. “It’s really a play about aftermath, which is endlessly fascinating to me. How long does [the aftermath] go on? And how do you deal with the weight of that?”
Hawkinson isn’t the only one fascinated by the dark, complex material. Demand for tickets has been so overwhelming that a surge of callers recently crashed the box office phone system; since then, tickets to performances — which opened July 13 and run through Aug. 16 — have sold out.
Much of that remarkable reaction is due to the red-headed, porcelain-skinned, fiercely intelligent Hawkinson, whose delivery has been described as “blistering,” “surgically precise,” “extraordinarily gutsy” and even “career-making.”
Dressed in skinny jeans, a blue wraparound blouse and a necklace adorned with a delicate locket, Hawkinson sat in her small, windowless dressing room on a recent afternoon, taking swigs from a water bottle and talking about the appeal of the role. With a spray of freckles across her nose and a gray headband in her wavy hair, she looks younger than her 28 years, speaks so softly at times that her voice almost seems to tremble, but also possesses a steely confidence. “I don’t care if people like me or like the character,” she says, adding that she doesn’t mind if people don’t like the play at all. “It’s not like my skin doesn’t crawl when I hear some of those lines.”
The topic of sexual abuse is hardly the stuff of feel-good entertainment. And the play has certainly made some viewers bristle. The theater’s Victory Magazine, for example, described the relationship between Una and her abuser Ray as “a passionate affair,” a description that raised eyebrows because it seemed to suggest mutual consent. How does Hawkinson describe what happened between Ray and Una?
“I think it’s abuse,” she says, not missing a beat. “I don’t question that. I don’t think the character does either.”
In “Blackbird” — British vernacular for jailbird — we encounter Una as she is about to confront Ray in the dank and cluttered break room of his office. Fifteen years earlier, they had met at a backyard barbecue. She had a schoolgirl crush. He felt something that, he says, made him believe that he loved her. What followed was a three-month “relationship.” Fast-forward to present day. Ray has served a three-year prison sentence for the abuse, changed his name and started a new life. Una, on the other hand, has been trying and failing to pick up the pieces of a shattered existence.
“What he did to her, in a way, it has always made her feel apart — apart from her relationships, apart from her family,” says Hawkinson. “Loneliness is a huge motif in this play; we hear about it over and over again. I tried to make that [loneliness] really clear to the audience. … Because everyone knows what it’s like to be lonely.”
Born in Bellingham, Wash., Hawkinson grew up in community theater. Her mother had been an amateur actress, and Hawkinson caught the acting bug early. By the time she was 11, she was appearing in four to five shows a year and, at home, stuffing a pillow under her shirt and pretending to be Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof.” Later, while preparing to play Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker,” a preteen Hawkinson insisted on walking around her house wearing a blindfold.
After graduating from Northwestern University, she settled in Chicago, landing parts at top theaters, including Victory Gardens, Steppenwolf, Lookingglass and Chicago Shakespeare. But the parts were often quirky roles, in which she played children, teenagers or “the saucy maid.” A lover of Shakespearean tragedies, she longed for something more, “something where I could delve deep and just really get into the psychology of the person.”
Last fall, when she heard that Victory Gardens would stage a production of “Blackbird,” she called Dennis Zacek, the theater’s artistic director, with whom she had worked before. But Zacek was annoyed that Hawkinson — who by then had moved to New York — had backed out of a previous role. He remained standoffish on the phone. “I said, ‘Yes, I’d be happy to see you,’ ” Zacek recalled. ” ‘But you have to audition. I’m not going to fly you in. It’ll be on your dime.’ ”
Hawkinson bought a ticket, flew out and promptly landed the part. “She crushed the competition,” said Zacek, noting happily that it took all of “five minutes” to decide to cast her. The key, Zacek said, was Hawkinson’s fearlessness onstage, her knack for conveying both strength and vulnerability, and for being able to show audiences the “girl within the woman.”
“It’s amazing to me. I was acting at that age, but it was all emotion. I didn’t have any skills,” said William Petersen, the former leading man on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” who was billed as the star in his role as Ray, but who has humbly yielded the spotlight to Hawkinson. “She has a lot of craft, and she’s very skilled.” More than that, he notes, “she really cares about this character. She believes in this woman and her story.”
Portraying Una with dignity and strength was important to Hawkinson, who has friends who’ve lived through incidents of sexual abuse. “I do know people that this has happened to. Sadly, we all do,” she said, citing reports that as many as 25 percent of women experienced abuse as children.
The impact of such a trauma can be as unpredictable as it is devastating. And every night, Hawkinson says, she sees something else in the character, some other nuance to explore. Up on the stage, she rages and weeps, bullies and pleads, collapses into a chair in one moment, and tosses that same chair across the room in another. “Some days the show is more emotional. Some days it’s more intellectual. Some days it’s louder, angrier,” she says. The task of interpretation is never ending, but to Hawkinson that is a wonderful gift. “Una is incredibly complicated,” she says. “I will never finish figuring her out.”
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ShowBiz Chicago Exclusive Interview: In Conversation with Blackbird’s Mattie Hawkinson
With such recent bravura productions as August: Osage County, The History Boys, and A Steady Rain under the dramatic belt of Chicago’s collective theatre community, it’s no surprise that the summer months have seen a new hatching of esteemed stage works. The most revered of titles belongs to Victory Gardens’ Blackbird, the searing drama depicting the drenched reunion between a child predator and his sexual prey. The Northwestern-trained Mattie Hawkinson performs the role of Una, the now-adult victim of a three-month series of heinous perpetration who confronts her attacker with steady will and surmounting desperation. ShowBiz Chicago sat down with Hawkinson to discuss Una’s development, what it was like to work with CSI’s Billy Petersen, and why Chicago can’t seem to get enough of this psychological thriller.
ShowBiz Chicago: Tell me about your journey to Blackbird.
MH: My first encounter with the play was seeing it at the Manhattan Theatre Club, the production in New York that Joe Mantello directed. I really liked the play and thought it was well written and very well acted and directed. And I thought, you know, I bet they’re going to do this everywhere next year and I should keep an eye out for who is doing it. I had worked [at Victory Gardens] before and had a relationship with [Artistic Director Dennis Zacek] so I requested an audition. He was kind enough to let me read. Billy [Petersen] and I liked each other, so I got cast.
ShowBiz Chicago: You had worked with Dennis before on The Snow Queen, Half and Half, and Hanging Fire. What was it like to collaborate with him again, as well as William Petersen?
MH: The process of working on it with those two guys has been fantastic! I really do have the best scene partner you could possibly hope for. He’s an incredibly generous actor, and it makes my job all the easier.
ShowBiz Chicago: Trust between actors is always a requirement onstage, but it seems an even larger necessity in Blackbird due to the sheer nature of the material and its dramatic course. How did you and William Petersen develop the relationship between Ray and Una?
MH: We believe and have the same philosophy, which is that anytime you have a question you need to read the script again. I reread my script everyday and I think Billy also looks at his. We all feel that the first resource dramaturgically speaking is always to go back to the text. We really want to do David Harrower’s production of Blackbird, not anyone else’s. In terms of finding the relationship, it’s all there on the page. We didn’t really superimpose anything on top of it. That play is so dense, so you can really take a lot of different directions given just what’s there off sheet. So the three of us agreed that the first resource was the playwright, and to trust in what the playwright had written.
ShowBiz Chicago: I’ve worked with child sexual abuse psychologists, and Blackbird has been of especial interest to that community. One theme that continually came up in our discussions of the issue is the notion of a victim’s emotional ambivalence, or rather the simultaneous state of feeling special yet demolished. How did you prepare for a role with such conflicting attachments?
MH: People have used the word ambivalence a lot to talk about that play. It’s funny because my experience of playing the character is that she may feel a wide spectrum of things, but ambivalence is not one of them. Never at any point onstage am I feeling nothing. There is the extreme polar opposite of being very angry, and having feelings of love for him still, and being conflicted [about that]. I also understand the idea of moral ambivalence being used to describe the play but in terms of these characters, the word overwhelming [comes to mind] as more accurate.
ShowBiz Chicago: David Harrower has said that Blackbird was inspired by the highly publicized crimes of sex offender Toby Studebaker. Did the fact that Una was based partly off of an actual victim, Shevaun Pennington, affect your approach to the character?
MH: It’s always in the back of mind that this really happens. The fact that it was inspired by a true story is no surprise, because we all know people who this has happened to. It’s so prevalent. I read some clinical studies that said 20% of women had been through a similar situation. Those odds are really shocking, but they’re kind of not because you think of how much sexual abuse goes unreported so the odds are probably even higher. It is something that deserves to be talked about and discussed, and also given relevance.
ShowBiz Chicago: With such an emotionally taxing role, how do you prepare yourself to delve into Una’s life night after night?
MH: (Laughing) I take my time off very seriously. When I’m not at the theatre I try to have fun. I’ve had a lot of family come in to see the play and so I’ve ended up acting as their tourist guide. You know, taking them around to see the Bean, Navy Pier, and the museums. So I end up doing frivolous things in my off time which counteracts how serious the play is. It’s been good for me to try and remember not to wallow.
ShowBiz Chicago: Not coincidentally I would imagine, Harrower’s Blackbird is saturated with symbolism. First there’s the garbage in the cafeteria that may indicate how Una feels about herself, then the fact that the name Una actually means lamb, and that, in addition to meaning ‘jailbird’, blackbirds were used in the Bible to pluck out the eyes of sinners.
MH: There’s also a story that we read, the story of St. Benedict. It’s this monk who had a blackbird fly around his head as an omen. The monk become overwhelmed with feelings of lust for flesh so he throws himself into a thorn bush, and we talk about bushes in the play because that’s where the first [predatory] incident happens. [Therefore] I think there’s a lot of symbolism. There’s even symbolism in our set if you look closely. There’s a big vending machine that says ‘cold drinks’ on it, and every time I think of that it seems like the watering hole, like we’re in the desert waiting for relief. We had a great set designer named Dean Taucher and he gave us an incredible playground to work on.
ShowBiz Chicago: One of the most striking elements of your performance is your ability to maintain a balance between two seemingly polarized physical states. Both physically and vocally you reach a place between composure and ruination. How did this physicality develop?
MH: Yeah, that didn’t develop until we got into previews, to be honest. Before that, [Billy and I] focused on the text, so it wasn’t until we got onstage and were in costumes that I found any sort of life for the character. It also helps to have [so many pairs] of eyes watching you because that makes you squirm, because you’re saying these really personal sexual things and it helped me find the physical awkwardness of her. That’s been something that’s been evolving. I think that the physical life is something that we never even talked about but now it’s happening, which I think is the way it’s supposed to go.
ShowBiz Chicago: In addition to being so successful both critically and financially, Blackbird has provoked a great deal of audience concern in Chicago. We unfortunately live in a society where many individuals partake in victim-blaming during sexual crimes. While still other members of our society turn their heads during such cases as with the Catholic church, and then there are those who choose to decipher a difference between pedophilia and adult-child “love” (i.e. NAMBLA). I am reminded of a line in Blackbird in which Una confesses that the trial judge stated that she held “suspiciously adult yearnings” which connotes a sexual precociousness. Knowing this, were audience reaction and interpretation of the issue ever a concern?
MH: It’s not a concern to me. First of all it’s not my job to be concerned with that because it’s a marketing problem and it is under the umbrella of the artistic direction of the theatre and whether or not they’re concerned with it, which I don’t believe they are. I was never under the impression that everyone would love this play. I guess that’s to be expected. However people want to react to the play is their business, it’s not my business. I feel like if the play elicits any emotional response then it was probably worth seeing in the first place, because at least it’s provoking something, if only a dialogue. I think it is a very well written piece of theatre and people who think that it might be controversial should probably see it for themselves and make that judgment. But in terms of people going around and blogging about it, I think that’s fantastic, because it’s always great when people have a reaction to a piece of a theatre.
ShowBiz Chicago: Moving on from Blackbird, I’ve heard that you’re very musically-inclined. You’ve done one of Sondheim’s most acclaimed pieces, A Little Night Music, twice.
MH: (Laughing) I think that might be my last time, at least with that role, because that character is [young] and I’m now 28 so I need to stop playing her. I just don’t know how much longer I can pass for young. I love that play! I know it backwards and forwards. I could probably do a one-woman A Little Night Music at this point. It really is a beautiful play.
ShowBiz Chicago: What are your upcoming projects that we can look forward to?
MH: I actually live in New York, so I’m going to be going back to NY and looking for another job after this is over. I always want to keep one foot in Chicago. I do still consider myself a part of the community here even though I don’t keep a residence here. I always want to come back. But I have to go back and pound the pavement and do the cliché New York actress thing after this.
ShowBiz Chicago: And finally, what are you dream roles, either musically or not?
MH: I love that question. I would love to do some Shakespeare. I haven’t had the chance to do that in a really long time and that was always my passion in school. It’s what I focused on and studied. I would love to get a chance to that. But those Shakespeare heroines are something you grow into. You wait your turn. I hope my turn is coming up some point in the next ten years.
But if Hawkinson’s stirring performance in Blackbird is any indication, it is doubtful that audiences will have to wait that long.
Must complexity equal moral ambivalence in ‘Blackbird’?
“Blackbird” runs through Aug. 9 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.; $30-$58 at 773-871-3000 and www.victorygardens.org. Starring William L. Petersen and Mattie Hawkinson. READ THE REVIEW posted July 14.
When it comes to judging a drama, complexity is close to the top of my list of desirable characteristics. In fact, it’s right below truth. The older you get, the less time you have for the simplistic. Life suggests itself to be otherwise.
Those who program the dramas on cable television certainly have gotten this message. “The Sopranos” was a great TV show because of the complexity of its mobster characters. “Dexter” provides a detailed look inside the mind of a serial killer. “True Blood” offers a rich gumbo of the vampire’s lot. “Big Love” looks at the many sides of polygamy. And so on. Each of these TV shows takes a traditionally abhorrent group or theme and treats it with a measure of empathy. And thus each made a splash by establishing itself as demonstrably different from the traditionally melodramatic treatments of such topics, which concluded that mobsters, serial killers, vampires and polygamists were all, well, various shades of evil.
You could surely make such a case. But if these were one-dimensional shows, audiences would have rejected them and the top-tier artists who made them would have bored to tears. But complexity has a close cousin that can get it into trouble with some people: Ambivalence. Moral ambivalence.
I’ve come face to face with that issue since I started writing about “Blackbird,” the riveting new show at Victory Gardens that stars William L. Petersen, a longtime off-Loop stalwart whose fan base went through the roof after he starred in the laudably complex “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”
“Blackbird,” penned by Scottish playwright David Harrower and based on a real-life incident, deals with a relationship between a 40-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl. Mercifully, you don’t see that relationship on the stage.
“Blackbird” takes place 15 years later, when the girl, now a 27-year-old woman, comes to confront the now 55-year-old man who once preyed on her innocence. Both Petersen and his co-star, the Chicago actress Mattie Hawkinson, are extraordinarily gutsy and extraordinarily good. In my review this week, I gave the show four stars, and I think you should go and see it.
But for many people, the flash point with this play has to do with what they see as its tendency to look at an illegal act from all sides (“A love most foul,” as one New York headline aptly put it after the play’s debut in New York in 2007). As these critics see it, such a complex treatment inevitably and indefensibly makes child sexual abuse more sympathetic. It doesn’t matter if there is also condemnation. As soon as you introduce the slightest note of compassion toward the abuser, you introduce ambivalence in an area where it has no place.
They also note that any suggestions that this is also “a love story of sorts” (to quote what the actors have said in interviews), albeit a twisted one, only intensifies this wrong.
And that’s the crux of the issue.
Without that note of ambivalence—and “Blackbird” does indeed provoke a few jolts of sympathy for its hapless central male—the drama would be trite. But there are those who say this topic should never be explored in such a manner.
Plays about tough topics often provoke viscerally censorious reactions. But in this case, I’ve also heard from people who’ve actually seen the play, thought the issues through and reached the conclusion that it is inappropriate. I deeply respect those points of view.
But I also don’t think that complexity and fullness are the enemies of morality. I think “Blackbird” is a deeply moral play, precisely because it has the guts to look at this issue from all sides. The more you understand about life’s strange stew of relationships, the more you’re able to withstand its assaults. “Blackbird” is not immoral. It is uncommonly wise.
Despite our wishes to the contrary, human beings remain vexingly ambiguous creatures. Some may be evil. Many are survivors. All are complicated.
by Chris Jones
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 for CSI’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.
William Petersen fans beware, ‘Blackbird’ is a long way from ‘CSI’
“Blackbird” previews through July 12, regular run through Aug. 9 at Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.; Tickets: $30-$58; 773-871-3000 and www.victorygardens.org. Starring William Petersen and Mattie Hawkinson.
Most open rehearsals attract a smattering of theater fans and insiders. When the Victory Gardens opened up a few minutes of rehearsal for its upcoming production of David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” a couple hundred people were waiting at the door.
The reason? William Petersen, star of the CBS series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Petersen’s fame is also the reason that 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 the 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.”
Chris Jones
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