I had been so looking forward to the current revival of "Blackbird" by the Scottish playwright David Harrower on Broadway. I was too late for the train in 2007 to see Jeff Daniels as Ray and Alison Pill as Una so I was eager to see this recent recent revival with Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams about the sexual relationship that happened between them 15 years earlier when he was 40 and she 12. Although upsetting and unsettling, we have become somewhat inured to the subject after decades of shows like Law and Order SVU, true stories of girls like Elizabeth Smart kidnapped as adolescents and held captive for years, and Middle Eastern and Indian men "marrying" girls of this age and younger and subjecting them to a life of rape and servitude.
There was no chemistry between Daniels and Williams. In the context of the play, it would have been important for us to understand the attraction that drew them together 15 years before and which continued to pull her to him 15 years later. Williams performance was all jitters and sharp angels. She entered at a pitch and remained that way for the entire 90 minutes of the play. The part calls for a more nuanced performance. She has spent 15 years yearning for him. What she has not come to terms with for 15 years is not that he violated her 12 year old self but that he deserted her. She has not come just to confront him; she wants him back and if she is to get him back she has to seduce him. As Shakespeare said in "Hamlet": "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action." But it's not there in her performance. It's really important for us to understand what they meant to each other and what might still connect them. Ray is obviously defeated from a life being punished for his actions, first in prison and then in being beaten down by life after prison as an offender, but I expect the playwright intended that we would get a glimmer of the man he had been 15 years before. Unfortunately Daniels does not have the opening for this to happen. During the curtain call he looked unhappy and uncomfortable, perhaps do to frustration. I doubt very much it was because he was having a hard time shaking his character.
The play itself is clunky. I wondered if it had been reworked since it's staging in 2007. And Joe Mantello's direction was workmanlike unlike his deft direction of the disapppointing "The Humans". And I am tired of seeing plays that end with the set being trashed as in the recent "The Glory of the World" at BAM and Ivo Van Hove's "The Misanthrope" at NYTW.
