Theatre in Review: Punch (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)

	Will Harrison and (background) Cody Kostro. Photo: Matthew Murphy

In Punch, the quality of mercy is not strained; it's a superpower. James Graham's astonishing, heartbreaking new play, based on a real-life incident, arrives at a time when half the world seems consumed with extracting justice, by which I mean revenge, against its antagonists. Graham offers a powerful counternarrative: Dynamically, yet delicately, staged by Adam Penford (in a production from the Nottingham Playhouse) with strong support from an accomplished design team and stunningly acted with a star-making performance at its heart, it dares to posit that forgiveness is the ultimate response to irreparable loss, an idea that may make it the most radical play in town.

Punch is the story of Jacob Dunne, a working-class lad from Nottingham who, despite a loving mother and grandmother (described as "aspirational working class"), is on a fast track to trouble. Diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, and positioned somewhere on the autism spectrum, he drops out of school. Growing up on a housing estate -- "this, like, big old, social experiment ... that basically fucking failed," he calls it-- he begins running (and taking) drugs, riding on a nonstop spree. In a cheeky digression, Jacob takes us his favorite route around the estate, designed to keep his illegal activities away from the omnipresent CCTV cameras.

Much of the first act follows him on a single night's pub-and-party crawl, fueled by constant infusions of beer, champagne, cocaine, and MDMA, staged by Penford with plenty of kinetic energy. Worryingly, Jacob's relentless search for the next high is also a hunt for some "drama" to cap off the evening. He makes no apology about his propensity for violence: "There is no other high in the world, forget your fuckin' skunk or spice or smack or scratch, none of it can beat the buzz that comes with beatin' up a slippin' bastard in defense of a mate. The look in their eyes when they're impressed, grateful, respectful... and even a bit fuckin' scared of you now too..." He adds that there is no satisfaction like "Barrelling back to someone's house, covered in blood and validation."

He finds his drama in spades when, summoned by a pal, he arrives at a set-to outside a pub and, without a second thought, delivers a knockout punch on a young man standing in a circle surrounded by toughs. Jacob instantly flees the scene, unaware that, with a single blow, he has killed James Hodgkinson, a young paramedic. (The official cause is brain damage from a fall on hard pavement.) Terrified, he is run to ground by the police, and, facing a murder rap that gets reduced to manslaughter, is sent to a "youth offender institute." As he struggles to get by in this atmosphere of testosterone-fueled hostility, a woman emerges from the onstage crowd, asking, "What are you going to do now? With your life? What do you want to do?"

Actually, we've seen her before. She is Joan, James' mother; she and David, James' father, from whom she is amiably divorced, are horrified at Jacob's relatively light sentence. (He is released after fifteen months.) Fighting back through the appeal system, they get no relief, a process that leaves them bitter and dispirited. "I'm becoming someone James wouldn't know. Wouldn't even maybe like," Joan says. "I thought once [Jacob is] convicted, that will help. But then it didn't, not really. And then when he was sentenced. And then this appeal. And then and then and then, but we're just stuck here, with these feelings." That's when she suggests taking a different path.

That path involves reaching out, through a restorative justice service, to Jacob, asking if he would be willing to communicate with them. (At this point, Joan and David know only the bare facts of James' death.) Jacob, back on the streets but essentially homeless and, with total resources of forty pounds, in danger of backsliding, agrees to answer their questions via correspondence. Painful as it is, the effects are salutary, providing a modicum of comfort for Joan and David and forcing Jacob to face the gravity of his crime. This sets up the next stage, not always attained, of this process: a face-to-face meeting between Jacob and James' parents. It's a devastating encounter, made all the more powerful because no voices are raised. Yet the simple act of spilling a glass of water sends an electric shock through the room.

Penford keeps the action, a mix of direct address and straight-up dramatic scenes, moving at a rapid clip, paced by Robbie Butler's inventive lighting and Alexandra Faye Braithwaite's cascade of underscoring and sound effects. Victoria Clark is luminous as dowdy, wounded, plainspoken Joan, struggling to make something meaningful out of her family's tragedy. ("One life has been wasted because of this," she says. "Senseless, no reason at all. So, where's the sense in wasting another?") Sam Robards is equally fine as David, who, having witnessed James' death, strikes a rather more skeptical position toward Jacob. But the production's revelation is Will Harrison as Jacob. Best known for his role in the series Daisy Jones & the Six, he establishes himself here as the rare performer who can shatter the fourth wall, channeling Jacob's Act I binge with a substance-fueled buzz and furious energy. Later, coming to grips with his crime, his profound discomfort seems to tear at his skin. On Broadway, it's unusual to see a new face tasked with carrying a production, but Harrison manages it with tremendous ability, never sugar-coating James' destructive aspects nor begging for our sympathy. It's an honest performance, through and through.

Penford also gets first-rate work from a cast adept at tackling multiple roles, including Camila Cano-Flavia, double-cast as a restorative justice facilitator and a young nurse who catches Jacob's eye; Cody Kostro as Jacob's younger brother, who has a secret of his own to impart; Piter Marek as one of Jacob's rougher colleagues and as the cop who brings him in; and Lucy Taylor as a sensible, tactful parole office and as Jacob's mother, whose grief causes her to slide into alcoholism.

The scenic designer Anna Fleischle, last seen in New York with the musical Once Upon a One More Time, creates a gritty and flexible environment dominated by an enormous semicircular staircase, complete with an underpass, backed by a vivid etching of the Nottingham cityscape. (Her costumes have a solid sense of the characters' everyday lives.) There's a quicksilver quality to Butler's lighting, whether flooding the stage with saturated color for a pub scene, flickering to suggest a roller-coaster ride, or switching between warm and cold washes to indicate the difference between Jacob then and now. Brathwaite's incidental music is never intrusive, and her evocative effects include church choirs, sirens, prison doors, and a creative cue signaling the slowdown effects of the drug ecstasy.

Punch is based on the book Right from Wrong by the real-life Jacob Dunne, and a quick Google search will reveal what his life has become. (James Hodgkinson is memorialized in the show's program and in a display in the lobby.) But the secret of the play's power is its ability to hold two opposing thoughts -- the awful nature of Jacob's offense and the possibility of a certain redemption -- at the same time. Indeed, as he learns, the only way forward is to face the terrible truth. (The play is also clear-eyed about the state of social services in the UK, including a neglectful educational system and government budget cuts that leave those in need stranded without necessary help. Nicola, from the restorative justice project, notes, "Most young offenders, because they try to avoid all that, thinking about the human cost of it all, that's why they can get sucked into a cycle they can't get out of." Punch suggests a way out, one that takes extraordinary bravery to achieve. --David Barbour