Review: 'Rabbit Hole'

Nixon leads good cast, but playwright only skims surface with a glum drama

BY LINDA WINER | STAFF WRITER

February 3, 2006

Cynthia Nixon, former star of "Sex and the City" is currently on Broadway in David Lindsay-Abaire's "Rabbit Hole." (Newsday/Ari Mintz)

Cynthia Nixon's face is a magnetized oasis of contradictory expectations - pastel and delicate at one angle, chiseled and formal at another. She can look fragile as a girl, almost at the same time she withdraws into a distant and forbidding beauty. She is both swan and matron, everybody's sweetheart and nobody's fool.

It is easy to imagine why this subtle actress might have been drawn to "Rabbit Hole" for her return to the stage after so many image-defining seasons in "Sex and the City." As Becca, the mourning mother of a dead 4-year-old son, Nixon is challenged to compress all her emotional plumage into the limited space between soul-dead and merely inconsolable.

She does so with great intelligence and no-nonsense grace in David Lindsay-Abaire's new drama, which opened last night on Broadway. When Becca finally cries, the sobs come in raw, jagged breaths that sound as ugly as they are meant to feel. With Tyne Daly as Becca's coarse but not vulgar mother, and director Daniel Sullivan's tastefully understated production, "Rabbit Hole" should be killing us softly with the brutality of bottomless sorrow.

Instead, this is a glum little play, a predictable domestic melodrama that adds nothing but fine acting to the cumulated understanding of inexplicable loss.

Theatergoers may be stunned to recognize this as the same author whose quirky and original comic nightmares have been a staple at Manhattan Theatre Club since "Fuddy Meers" introduced him in 1999. That one was an American-gothic outlaw-absurdist farce about an elderly stroke victim, an amnesiac who has only a few hours every day to understand her plight before forgetting it all again.

Two years later came "Wonder of the World," which enticed Nixon's "Sex and the City" co-star Sarah Jessica Parker into a perkily tiresome misadventure about a runaway wife. Two years more and we got "Kimberly Akimbo," a zany annoyance about a teen with a rapid-aging disease.

If Lindsay-Abaire hit the wall on whimsy - and who could blame him? - he appears also to have snuffed out his voice and any hint of wit in the crash. Despite its similar subject, "Rabbit Hole" has little of the chilling power of "Ordinary People," Robert Redford's 1980 movie in which Mary Tyler Moore, cast against type, embodied a grief beyond feeling.

We first meet Becca as she folds a child's clothing in the kitchen of her well-appointed, once loving suburban home (designed with careful detail and nifty turntables by John Lee Beatty). She is preparing to clear the house of every reminder of her dead son, who, eight months earlier, chased the dog she never liked into the street and was hit by a car driven by a teenager.

Despite Nixon's intrinsic sympathy, we suspect Becca was never such a nice woman. She's a priss when her wilder young sister uses curse words. She's a snob about the distinction between custard and crème brûlée. When her grieving husband - played with crushingly increasing bitterness by John Slattery - tries finally to reconnect their intimacy, we find it hard to imagine that she ever was much fun.

Daly, a genuine stage actress in a rare appearance, delivers her lines with more layers than they have on the page. She takes a standard-issue, salt-of-the-earth character with a tabloid interest in the Kennedy curse and makes her wisdom seem more than an author's contrivance. Mary Catherine Garrison pouts with an enjoyable overripe quality as the pregnant unwed sister who never had a chance against her superior sister. John Gallagher Jr. has a wary, touching awkwardness as the teenage driver whose life was derailed as profoundly as anybody's.

The characters go from grief to unbearable sorrow to sadness. The drama, alas, goes nowhere.