David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole” is a play very much about grief and coping with it. And for him, that’s different.

It is the last play of the weekend, and the only one in the New Theatre. The New is not the old Black Swan (yea! actors are saying), but it’s by far the most intimate space the OSF has. So bring the Kleenex.

It’s kitchen sink theater to the max (like the man said, recognize your prejudices and blind spots, dude): a middle-aged couple, a 4-year-old son dead for no reason (the very thing Hemingway came up with when he wanted an image of great sadness), an emotional jumble they can’t seem to find their way out of.

It sounds like one of those disease-of- the-week TV movies.

James Edmondson, who is a terrific director, directs, so it has that going. And the parents are Bill Geisslinger and Robin Nordli, who gets more plum roles at OSF than just about anybody but Kevin Kenerly, and who showed you why in the inspired if uneven “UP” last year.

This is a different stroke for Lindsay-Abaire. The OSF did a good production of his Fuddy Meers a few years back, and I’ve seen nice productions of his Kimberly Akimbo at Artattack in Ashland and Lord Leebrick in Eugene. But consider, in the former a woman wakes up every morning not remembering who she is. In the latter a 16-year-old girl has that disease in which you age at four times the normal rate. Ideas that work in a darkly humorous, quirky, contrived sort of way.

If you liked those plays (I did), you might wonder how Lindsay-Abaire came to write a Rabbit Hole. But if you found those plays kind of whimsical/gimmicky, as some did, you’ll probably applaud him for going for a heart-twanging realistic drama.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 9:48 am and is filed under The Shakespeare Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.