AH, PANIC ATTACKS—those special moments when your overloaded fight/flight response terrorizes you with the certitude that you are about to become, as a friend of mine once joked, "that guy," the one found dead in his bathroom. Panic thoughts can be hilarious—if you're not in panic. And that's how Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, a Red Lantern Theatre production directed by Lance Gardner, turns out to be emotionally claustrophobic and pretty darned funny all at the same time.
In this two-character play, Danny (Corby Kelly) worries that he might give himself a heart attack by thinking about it too much. "I don't wanna die from my own mind!" Like Danny, Roberta (Allison Asher) thinks she's going to blow up "if I don't get out of this fucking head." Danny and Roberta meet as they sit alone at adjacent tables in a working-class bar in the Bronx. Long before the start of the play, Asher sits at the small triangular table munching on the free pretzels, staring into the bowl or off into space with bluesy Americana music playing in the background. In the small Pear Avenue Theatre space, this blurring of real and theatrical time turns the audience into a barroom of people entering and chatting all around Roberta as if she isn't there.
This clever isolation sets the play's main theme. When Danny sits down at his own table, the two guarded, hostile, wounded strangers do the dance of connecting from the basic East Coaster starting point of "fuck off." As Roberta and Danny charge the air with confessions, threats and trapped emotion, raw emotion gets right up in your face. And Gardner forces the issue by cutting the performance area in half, blocking off the rear half with cheap bar-type curtains. Depending so heavily on repartee between two not-especially-articulate people could go terribly wrong if Asher and Kelly didn't fall so deeply into these two characters.
Wearing bad-ass attitude and varied expressions of "I'm fucked up," the two are an excruciating joy to watch. As people whose use of the "f" word covers every part of speech and fills every sentence, Asher and Kelly wield their favorite obscenity with ease, in all its voluptuous, proud-to-be-déclassé glory. Asher's Roberta rings real, tough and Bronxy, smoothly shifting out of her callous facade to reveal momentary chinks of flirtation or nurturing. Roberta's anomalies are reflected in her room: mattress on the floor, Lucky Strikes in the ash tray, a broken-down lamp stand, and yet on one night table, a bride doll sits beside a candle (set designer Jennifer Jigour does a lot with a little).
Kelly adds a magnetic combination of harsh, soft, dumb, intuitive, walled, receptive to the chemistry. With tentative bearing and almost brittle hand movement from beneath a frayed bandage and drooping sleeves, he suggests Danny's brokenness as well as an inherent tenderness beneath the brutal posturing ("They call me the beast"). Costume designer Ashley Rogers provides another production bulls-eye in Danny's dress, especially the flannel shirt and white thermal T-shirt combo. All together, Gardner, Asher (also artistic director) and crew have made this a tight, intense show (which may incidentally be the best place for the anti-Christmas crowd to hide out this season). The play's end doesn't give us an ending, but a moment in time. And it leaves us to juggle our own beliefs about the odds for caring and intimacy in this racing-from-its-shadow world we live in.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, a Red Lantern Theatre production, plays Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 7pm at the Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear Ave., Unit K, Mountain View. Tickets are $10-$15. (650.274.6721)
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