“Rabbit Hole” is a play about a couple whose 4-year-old son has been killed in a car accident. It is not about a couple that endlessly blubbers about it onstage.
“That would be torturous and very uninteresting to sit through,” David Lindsay-Abaire wrote in the script notes for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, in which he stipulates that the actors playing his parents should open the waterworks exactly one time each.
So they had better make them count.
For Becca, who’s now being played at Curious Theatre by Rachel Fowler, the moment comes when the boy driving the car that killed her son visits eight months later. After keeping her emotions tightly in check, her breakdown is an unexpected moment of total release.
“I cry in the most ugly fashion ever,” Fowler said with a laugh. “I can feel the snot coming out of my nose. My mouth is open for so long that I’m drooling on my pants.”
But director Christy Montour-Larson doesn’t see that as being ugly at all. “I see it as true.”
The art of crying on cue is one of the trickiest bits of stage business for any actor to pull off. Sentimental, indulgent histrionics turn audiences off. It places them on the outside of the moment.
These most delicate of stage acts are not always about producing instant fluid. They’re about conveying truthful human emotion in the artifice of the theater.
So how does an actor believably cry onstage? The same way one best conveys drunkenness — by trying to play the opposite. If his stage directions don’t mention tears, Lindsay-Abaire begs actors, “resist them.” Resistance leads to honesty.
“Human beings deal with grief when they can, and how much of it they can, at any given time,” Fowler said. “Every character in this play is dealing with their grief completely differently.
“Becca is trying to make sense of it cerebrally, and not letting it in here,” she added, pointing to her heart. “I think she can’t touch her grief because if she does, she will fall apart. So it’s better for her to hold it down.”
Becca’s husband Howie, played by Erik Sandvold, is wallowing in his pain. “And those are both fine ways of going through it,” Fowler said.
But when Howie gets his chance to fall apart, the playwright forbids Becca from joining in.
“It has been a real struggle for me as an actress to find a strong enough obstacle for me not to cry with him, too,” Fowler said. “This is a man I have built a life with. We’ve had a child together, and we’ve lost a child together. And I am watching him fall apart.
“But the line that I am given is, ‘Do you really not know me?’ . . . So she’s very detached from it all in that moment.”
Fowler has appeared in four plays since moving to Denver, and she’s been called upon to cry in all of them. Most notably was her remarkable portrayal of Kate Keller in the Denver Center’s “The Miracle Worker.” The key there, too, was resistance.
“William Gibson wrote Kate Keller as a hysterical woman who was weeping at every opportunity, and I was like, ‘That is so boring,’ ” Fowler said. “I think it’s so much more compelling to watch someone struggling not to cry.”
Or, as Montour-Larson’s teachers always taught her, “Let the audience cry for you.”
But cry actors must, and they employ a variety of methods to do so. Most famous is Constantin Stanislavski’s practice of having actors recall real pain from their own lives.
Lucy Roucis, who does her share of weeping in the handicapped company PHAMALy’s new production of “Steel Magnolias,” swears by it.
“I flash the saddest moments of my life before my eyes,” said Roucis, who was a rising Los Angeles actress when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 21 years ago. “I see my dad lying dead in a hospice . . . I hear my mom saying, ‘Daddy closed her eyes,’ after my sister Judy died. That gets me choked up.”
Montour-Larson supports her cause. “I’m for whatever works,” she said. But Montour-Larson, who teaches theater at Metro State, also believes Stanislavski, who died in 1938, has been misunderstood for generations.
“Emotional recall was something Stanislavski used strictly as a rehearsal exercise, where people would use their own personal experiences to create the emotion that they needed on stage,” she said.
Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg were among the many acting teachers who popularized Stanislavski’s method in the U.S. “But when Stella Adler and (her husband) Harold Clurman went to Paris to visit Stanislavski as he was dying,” Montour-Larson said, “they discovered that he had moved far beyond emotional recall as a means of creating truthful human emotion onstage.”
She believes an actor’s personal memories don’t work as well as his mere imagination.
“It’s more accessible, it’s safer, it’s richer, and it’s deeper,” she said. “As time passes, a painful memory doesn’t have the same emotional impact as something in your fantasy right now.”
But inevitably, an actor’s life will intersect with her role. Fowler is a mother. The fact that her child is a daughter, and just 16 months old, brings welcome distance for her work in “Rabbit Hole.”
“I actually had a harder time playing Kate Keller because Helen got sick at 18 months of age,” Fowler said. “I look at my daughter and think, ‘This would be about the time that Helen went blind and deaf.’ That’s hard.”
Montour-Larson doesn’t feel restricted that her “Rabbit Hole” playwright stipulates when her actors are to cry — and not. “I look at it as a puzzle,” she said. “I look at individual moments in the script and go, ‘OK, so . . . why do you cry here? And why don’t you cry there? What is the playwright telling us?”
Worse is when any playwright or director tries to measure the success of a scene by the presence of tears.
“If somebody told me, ‘I have to see tears or it doesn’t work,’ I would say, ‘Bull,’ ” Fowler said. To Montour-Larson, “You can’t call the emotion.”
Her main purpose as a director, she says, “is just to help people go out into the deep water. What you want is for the person to do, feel and understand. If you can do that, the rest will come.
“And it will be real.”
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Rabbit Hole”
Drama. Curious Theatre, 1080 Acoma St. Written by David Lindsay- Abaire. Directed by Christy Montour-Larson. Through Feb. 14. 8 p.m. Thursdays- Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays starting Jan. 18. $24-$37 (2-for-1 Thursdays). 303-623-0524 or
“Steel Magnolias”
Robert Harling’s weeper about the softhearted “magnolias” with the steely Southern dispositions at Truvy’s Beauty Salon.
Presented by PHAMALy at the Aurora Fox Arts Center, 9900 E. Colfax Ave. Written by Robert Harling. Directed by Nick Sugar. Through Jan. 31. 7:30 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and some Thursdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. $20-$24. 303-739-1970 or Appropriate for ages 12 and up.
This week’s video podcast:
Running Lines at … The final “SantaLand Diaries”
This week, Denver Post theater critic John Moore reports from Gary Culig’s final performance after 10 straight Decembers at The Bug Theatre. Guests include: Culig, Alex Weimer, Lindsey Pierce, Matt Strauch and Gary Culig Sr. Recorded Dec. 22, 2008. Run time: 9 minutes.
This weekend’s other theater openings
“Buddy … The Buddy Holly Story”
This rocking bio-musical re-creates Buddy Holly’s unforgettable appearance at the Apollo Theatre, and his final concert with Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper. Through March 14. Carousel Dinner Theatre, 3509 S. Mason St., Fort Collins, 970-225-2555 or
“The Color Purple”
National touring production of Alice Walker’s musicalized epistolary novel about a poor black woman’s struggles through life in the early 1900s. Through Jan. 18. Buell Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets, 303-893-4100 or
“Honky Tonk Laundry”
A musical tribute to Nashville via two country angels who turn their laundromat into a honky-tonk. Through March 28. Nonesuch Theatre, 216 Pine St., Fort Collins, 970-224-0444 or
“My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra”
Revue with classic songs including “Chicago,” “Fly Me to the Moon” and “I Get a Kick Out of You.” Through Feb. 8. Town Hall Arts Center, 2450 W. Main St., Littleton, 303-794-2787 or
“Rumors”
Neil Simon farce in which four couples arrive at a swank New York City anniversary party. Wackiness ensues. Through Feb. 8. Hunger Artists at the Buntport Theater, 717 Lipan St., 303-893-5438 or
“Shining City”
In this contemporary Irish ghost story, Conor McPherson explores what it means to lose faith in God and in one’s self. Through Feb. 15. Miners Alley Playhouse, 1224 Washington St., Golden, 303-935-3044 or
“Terra Nova”
Playwright Ted Tally combines reality, fantasy and memory to tell the ill- fated Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott. Through Jan. 24. Longmont Theatre Company, 513 Main St., Longmont, 303-772-5200 or
“You Can’t Take It With You”
Kaufman and Hart’s timeless comedy about the wacky Sycamore family. Through Feb. 8. Jesters Dinner Theatre, 224 Main St., Longmont, 303-682-9980 or
Compiled by John Moore
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