He saw what it should be, and he saw a perfect thing, and then it just took all the years it took to build the perfect thing, but he saw the machine glowing in the distance.ĭEADLINE: Was your trepidation about the mechanics of the lip syncing, just the physical requirements of that, or the added burden of have to act on top of the lip-syncing? It seems to me those are two distinct challenges. So, it was pretty exciting actually because, a lot of times you go in and you go like, well, it’s ours to screw up here, but was very much like, “I wonder if the audience will just stand up and leave?” The fact is though that Lucas saw a perfect thing in his mind. Like, can we actually pull this off, and then will it be theater that people want to sit and watch? Those were all questions that I didn’t know the answer to when we went in. So, we kind of went into it with that deal in mind, but it was an experiment from the beginning.
If I can’t do it, then at some point I’ll just…I said, “if I can’t do it, I’m just going to turn to you guys and go, like, look, I’m just bad at this. All those things went through my mind, but the thing was so beautiful, the piece of writing was so beautiful, the interview was so beautiful, the idea was so compelling, and I sort of went into it thinking if I can do this, great. I wondered if I would be too sad, you know, when I was working on it. I wondered if it would be very claustrophobic. You know, it’s just one of those things, like you don’t know if your brain works that way or if you have the mechanics because I’d never done it. I’ve never seen anybody do it, and I didn’t know if it was possible, and I didn’t know if I would have a particular gift for it or just not be able to do it. I wasn’t sure that I could lip sync like that. Deirdre O’Connell Courtesy Matt Ross PRĭEADLINE: When did you first hear of Dana Higginbotham and Dana H., the real person and the play?ĭEIRDRE O’CONNELL: It was Lucas getting in touch with me and asking me if I wanted to work on it with him and he sent me the transcript, and it was quite clear to me instantly that I really wanted to, but I was pretty scared because I wasn’t sure whether I could do it. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. In this interview with Deadline, O’Connell talks about that weird non-credit, about Dana, about Athena and about the challenges of carrying a Broadway show without uttering a single syllable. She did not, however, tap-dance as a child on Fernwood 2 Night, despite what you might read elsewhere.
#FUNNY WORDS THAT START WITH H TV#
O’Connell is a familiar and acclaimed presence on the New York stage (currently appearing in Will Arbery’s Corsicana, directed by Sam Gold at Playwrights Horizons) and known to TV and film audiences for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York, Law & Order and, indelibly, her performance as the free-spirited, egregiously irresponsible Athena Bailey, mother to Ruth Wilson’s Alison Bailey in Showtime’s The Affair. The effect was an unforgettable portrait of trauma and survival, at once nightmarish and weirdly commonplace. is told not only told in the words of the woman who lived it, but in her voice: O’Connell, in one of the most mesmerizing performances of the year, lip-synced to recorded interviews of Higginbotham.
Terrorized, gaslighted, threatened and subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse, the abduction lasted for five months, from one motel to another, in the dark of night and broad daylight, hotel clerks and police officers repeatedly turning blind eyes.įinal Curtains: Broadway Shows About To Close - A Photo GalleryĪs if demanding that the universe finally pay heed to her story, Dana H.
The word that seems to crop up most often in descriptions of both Dana H., the play written by Lucas Hnath, and Dana H., the characterization by Deirdre O’Connell, is “harrowing,” – few reviewers could resist, for the simple reason that no other word seems to come close to capturing the real-life experience that the work chronicled and the effect the telling had on audiences.ĭana H., which ran on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre last fall and is nominated for three Tony Awards (for Les Waters’ direction, Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design and O’Connell’s performance), tells the unlikely but all too true story of Dana Higginbotham, the mother of the playwright, a chaplain in a Florida psychiatric hospital who, in 1997, was abducted by a violent psychopath who’d been under her care.
0 kommentar(er)
