Theatre in Review: Blackbird (Belasco Theatre)

	Michelle Williams. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

In a way, it's remarkable that Jeff Daniels chose to revisit the role of Ray, the beleaguered middle manager whose past comes calling, in Blackbird. (He performed it in 2007 at Manhattan Theatre Club.) The role is so challenging that, having aced it the first time around, many an actor would have concluded that once was enough. It's our good fortune that he has come back for a second helping, accompanied by a new, and formidable, costar in Michelle Williams. The sight of them at the curtain call, looking drained and disheveled, confirms what one suspects while watching David Harrower's play: These are roles that make cruel demands on those who dare to take them on.

Nine years on from its New York premiere, Harrower's script has lost none of its provocative power, its ability to leave deep and lasting wounds. The action begins on a furious note with Ray, who works at a company that makes dental products, racing into a conference room, dragging along Una, a young woman in her twenties. Not a second is wasted on exposition; from the first line, they are locked in combat. And although they haven't seen each other in years, it quickly becomes apparent that together they inhabit their own little personal corner of hell. Ray and Una are ex-lovers who ended badly -- a fact that, under normal circumstances, might make their reunion a volatile one. But the audience's discomfort level explodes when Una asks, furiously, "How many other 12-year-olds have you had sex with?"

Fifteen years before, Ray attended a neighborhood barbecue where he first encountered Una, a pre-teen who, they both agree, came on to him a little bit. But Ray responded, and what started out as a flirtation quickly turned into a full-blown affair. They were eventually found out, and Ray went to prison for several years. As Una acidly notes, he was lucky to be caught when he was: If it had occurred a few years later, he would have permanently ended up on a list of sex offenders. As it happened, he did his time, moved away, found work, and now lives with a partner. The past is behind him -- or so he thinks, until Una shows up.

What follows is a brutal inventory of the damage caused by their liaison, reflected in her furious, fruitless search for some kind of closure and his increasingly pathetic attempts at self-justification. Both see the past through the distorting filter of their unresolved pain. "I wanted you to be my boyfriend," Una says accusingly, adding that she was "a stupid girl with a stupid crush." "You were older than that woman I was seeing," Ray counters. "You couldn't wait to start menstruating." Clearly, the years haven't taught Ray anything about appropriate behavior.

No detail of their brief affair is too squalid for them to relive -- the codes that allowed them to make dates, their sexual positions, and, later, after they were found out, how she was -- against her will -- probed for evidence of a sexual relationship. In a classic blame-the-victim moment, the judge at Ray's trial noted Una's "suspiciously adult yearnings," the entire experience proving so traumatic that she went on a sexual tear, behaving as promiscuously as the adults around her seemed to expect. But these confessions provide no catharsis, as the two remain utterly at odds: Una is possessed of an annihilating rage that is as destructive to her as it is to Ray. And Ray, while freely admitting his guilt, is furious at being made to relive the episode. He insists, to Una's disbelief, that he isn't a serial pedophile, that she represents a one-off relationship that ruined his life, a claim that slyly puts the responsibility for everything back on her. The tangle that holds them together is a fiendish one: Any attempt at escaping it only binds them more closely.

Nearly a decade older, Daniels is even more at home inside Ray's dispirited, shriveled soul than before. In the early scenes, he paces around the conference room like a caged animal, fear and rage locked together. There's a constant undertone of grievance in everything he says, suggesting that anyone who knew the full story wouldn't entirely blame him for the consequences. He convinces one that Ray actually believes his bizarre exculpatory explanations, for example noting that on the day he first met Una he was wearing tight shorts ("It was the style then") that would have exposed his erection, if he had had one. His lined face framed by a bad, squarish haircut, his cheap dress shirt forever coming untucked, his basic posture a pose of defense, Daniels makes Ray into a figure who has been poleaxed by life without fully grasping his own role in it.

In contrast to Alison Pill, who previously played Una and seemed only minutes older than the girl she once was, Williams comes across as a fully grown woman, albeit one who remains stranded in the moment of the trauma that changed her life. As she showed in Cabaret a couple of seasons back, she is a nervy technician who builds her performance on a series of effects -- wild mood swings, a little-girl whine contrasted with a deep-in-the-diaphragm voice of denunciation, fits of rage so powerful she seems almost possessed -- that a lesser actress might not be able to pull off. She makes all this (and more) convincing almost through sheer force of will. And many of the details are deeply revealing: Una recoiling in horror from Ray's touch, and, later, alone in the darkened room, trembling in fear of being abandoned. She also handles the play's longest and most sustained aria, an account of the night that everything unraveled, with chilling detachment.

Joe Mantello stages this dance of mutual recrimination with almost choreographic skill, framing it as a series of attacks and retreats. He skillfully uses a set of extras, only partially glimpsed in passing behind the office's frosted windows, to create a sense of the life of the company unfolding behind the psychodrama at center stage. And he stages with brio the sequence in which Ray and Una, desperately in need of some kind of release from the tension of their confrontation, lay waste to the room, which is already covered in the remains of someone's lunch, followed by a bit of business that reveals that Ray and Una's mutual desire is the equal of their deep-dyed hatred.

The set, by Scott Pask, the only returning member of the original design team, accurately evokes the killing banality of one of those low-rise office buildings that can be found on the edge of almost any midsize American city, its gray-on-gray palette broken only by the snack machine placed upstage left. It speaks volumes about Ray's fallen state in life, as does the discount-house office wear in which he has been dressed by Ann Roth; the costume designer has also cannily outfitted Williams in a dress that is disconcertingly short and seductive for someone on a mission of revenge. Brian MacDevitt captures the cheerless, clinical look of office lighting, but he also subtly modulates his design to highlight the play's most telling moments. Fitz Patton's sound design includes the background noise of people at work.

Even with its sordid narrative and hollowed-out characters, Blackbird seems to me a modern expression of tragedy. Ray and Una are caught in a trap from which there is no escape; whatever decision either makes will likely be a ruinous one. (This seems especially true following the play's stunning eleventh-hour twist, not to be revealed here. I had forgotten it, in part, I think, because the implications of it are too disturbing.) Daniels and Williams nevertheless lend to life in that trap an ugly, electric vitality. -- David Barbour