PLAY: "Blackbird"

Although Blackbird is an ambiguous title, the playwright's name--David Harrower--manages to perfectly pronounce the tone of the piece. Like other famous Davids (Mamet comes to mind), he has created a terse, harrowing, 90-minute showdown between an office manager and the 27-year-old girl he had "illegal relations" with when she was twelve. Not going the easy route, he makes Ray (Jeff Daniels) the victim. The moment we meet him, he stands in a self-defeated slouch; when he speaks, it is with a choking sound, as if his mouth were clenched into a fist. Meanwhile, Una (Alison Pill), is the cat-like tormentor, languorously mocking Ray from a plastic chair, curling and uncurling both her body and her accusations in sudden rushes of text. She plays him like a ball of string, batting him around with the truth and staring him down with piercing, innocent eyes--like those of a child--and an adult, almost Cheshire-like grin.

Harrower's script gives them both ample opportunity to play. Una isn't really there for closure, and Ray's conception of pedophilia defies expectations: "I was never one of them," he claims. There's a bleak humor in realizing that Ray means it: he admits that his trial would have gone better if he had been abused as a child, and that if he had managed to return to her bedside, he would have looked even guiltier (he flight at least makes it seem as if he recognized his guilt).
As my theatergoing friend pointed out, this is akin to the justifications (and tone) of Martin in Edward Albee's The Goat. But whereas Albee was writing a satirical tragedy with heavy doses of melodrama to lighten the blows, Harrower is more interested in the uncomfortably bleak question of whether or not love can ever be wrong.

Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill are both extremely talented performers her, and their nuances are what make that question so hard to answer. Una acts a little neurotic, but if she really is traumatized, then perhaps love is a trauma. Ray, although at first angrily dismissive, is a man still on the edge, simply trying to protect what little dignity he's been left with after prison. The two are fragile, and the play's strongest, most settling moment, is a post-coital remembrance:

"Did I cum?" she asks, with the subtext of lingering trauma. Him, in ragged response: "I thought you did. Yes." "How could you tell?" she says, so much like a child that it's painful. "Your face was flushed. You kept your eyes shut a long time."

The sentences are short and natural, as is the style of the entire play. While it's easier to believe she was a shameless girl with a crush, stupid enough to start, and that he was a lonely man too stupid to stop her, Harrower takes a more critical approach. When Ray says, "You weren't like other children.... You knew more about love than I did, than she did," we believe him. Harrower also manages to conflate two issues: after Una is found, the detectives all but rape her (cleaning her out) to get their evidence: "They asked me what you'd done to me and then told me what you'd done to me when I wouldn't." It's not an easy (or pretty) task, but it's staggeringly effective.

The only place where Blackbird has its dark wings clipped is in Joe Mantello's lighting choice. After going through so much effort to construct a realistic office on stage (kudos to Scott Pask), and then to focus the action within a single, prison-like conference room, it doesn't make sense to change the natural direction for the two lengthy monologues each character gets. Granted, it isn't easy to find things for the other character to do while they're being lectured, but that's the director's job. The harsh, soft lights of the office (Paul Gallo's design) are enough: the theatrics of dimming them comes across as cheap and distracting.

Blackbird is a show well-worth seeing, capable of casting some doubts on what is otherwise a morally unambiguous issue. For all that the dialogue is naturally awkward, full of false starts and stops, it's at the same time technically crisp and precise, rehearsed just enough to feel fresh and not at all sloppy. Whether or not you agree with Harrower's stark appraisal of love, Blackbird is an important piece for Manhattan Theater Club, no Doubt about it.

FILM: "The Lookout"

As a writer, I always get a personal thrill from watching another author put down the pen and paper for a moment to get behind (or in front of) the camera. There's no passing the buck at this point, no middle-man to reinterpret the idea: The Lookout is Scott Frank channeling Scott Frank, and there's nothing holding him back. Except for the genre of film: I get the creepy notion, watching Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) trying to sequence the events of a normal day, that I'm watching Little Man Tate trapped in a thriller.

To give another parallel, this film is a little like watching the world of The Talented Mr. Ripley creeping in to Good Will Hunting. On one level, Chris is trying to recover from the car crash that has made him dependent on routine and careful organization. His family (as depicted in a very creepy, wonderful return home) can't accept that he's no longer a rising young hockey star, his old friends (including his old girlfriend, whom he crippled) can't look him in the eye for fear of seeing their own mortality, and all he's got is the wonderfully wry shoulder of his wise, blind roommate, Lewis, to pick up the pieces of some sort of life. On the other, Gary (Matthew Goode) would like to manipulate him with sexual distractions like Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher), into not only helping him rob the bank (Chris is a janitor), but into taking the fall as well. The problem with these colliding themes (real as they may be) is that whereas Memento wound the two up into one narratively thrilling adventure, The Lookout reveals everything to us far in advance: Chris may forget that he's hidden a gun, but the audience remembers, and so there are no surprises, and without surprises, there's no thrill--just drama.

Luckily, the drama's pretty good. So's the direction. These are fine actors, and the only ones who don't get fleshed out are the fodder-like robbers there to help Gary with the heist. My favorite characters are probably the most minimized: there's Deputy Ted (Sergio Di Zio), who stops by the bank with a box of donuts every night just to spend time with Chris and also Chris's friend, a shy teller at the bank named Mrs. Lange (Alex Borstein) who obviously has a crush on him. Whole volumes could've been spent on these characters, and while I don't blame Frank for fixating on the troubled Pratt, he needs to realize that directing is a lot like writing: the best stuff comes out of freeing yourself from the lines on the page, and going right through them.

I enjoyed The Lookout: it's a warm and genuine character study, and save for a few telegraphed scenes, it does its best to instill the audience with equal parts helplessness and hope. I don't agree that the best way to tell a story is to start at the end (any more than I like the catchphrase: "Whoever has the money has the power"), but Scott Frank doesn't either, and his straightforward approach to one man's slippery slope of life makes for some great film.