Jordan Baker in ‘Dana H.’, Photo by John Lauener
A Goodman Theatre, Center Theatre Group, Vineyard Theatre Production
“You adapt to maladaption.” It is a disquieting self-contradiction and eerily emblematic of the whole experience. I can’t remember ever seeing a performance that felt so real and unreal at the same time.
In this touring production of Lucas Hnath’s acclaimed play, presented by Crow’s Theatre, Jordan Baker plays Dana H.—who happens to be the playwright’s mother. Back in 1997, while Hnath was at college, Dana Higginbotham was kidnapped by a member of the Aryan Brotherhood—a man we know only as “Jim,” an ex-con and escaped patient from the psychiatric ward at which she was chaplain.
Baker lip-syncs to recorded interviews with Higginbotham. Her performance is astonishing, not because of anything demonstrably dramatic, but rather her convincingly naturalistic embodiment of someone else’s vocal idiosyncrasies. Just sitting in a chair, she draws us into a fully realized world as she finds minute, seemingly unconscious motivations for myriad ambient sounds in the audio track. A shifting of weight, an intake of breath, the jingle of bracelets as she shakes the tension out of her arms—these human impulses are set and yet feel as spontaneous here as at the time of original recording.
This impressive trick is achieved through a tight collaboration between Baker, Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design and Steve Cuiffo, an illusion and lip-sync consultant. Together, they turn the relentless constraint of precise, nuanced choreography into an urgent and dynamic encounter between Dana and us. Our perception of the effect triggers a surreal ambivalence that mirrors her own.
Her casual, almost blasé delivery adds to our hyper-awareness. She seems so detached from, even amused by, her own trauma. The baffling ineffectualness of institutional supports—like police and hospitals—during her five-month ordeal registers as simultaneously otherworldly and banal. Like her, we are conditioned to accept a new normal—to internally reconcile a dizzying blur of contradictions as she’s dragged from motel to motel in the Southern US, witnessing appalling violence and surviving physical and psychological abuse of her own.
Jim’s obsessive attachment to her is somewhat mystifying, though her inspiring empathy does provide a potential key to unlocking his motivations. She doesn’t like him, but she confesses to a certain dreadful admiration. The prolonged event, as objectively awful at it is, starts to make a certain skewed sense to her. As she grasps at hazy memories, accepts her situation as familiar and inevitable, she embraces the dysfunction and her own thwarted agency as part of her essential being.
The drab verisimilitude of Andrew Boyce’s generic motel set can’t be overstated. Shoddy workmanship and water damage creep in the corners of this oppressively mundane space which seems to stare back at you. Paul Toben’s lighting transforms it—taking us from cool fluorescence to subtle, distinctive theatricality. In a sequence that feels surprisingly invigorating despite its depiction of a monotonous routine, director Les Waters’ generally restrained staging gives us a Lynchian interlude, a beautifully ominous time-lapse abstraction of motel-room life.
Dana H. is an innovative, technically demanding form of verbatim theatre. Harrowing, haunting, funny and therapeutic—these are all accurate descriptors, though none of them do full justice to the sense of documentary rigour and intensely voyeuristic atmosphere.
Dana H.
running March 12 to April 7, 2024
Factory Theatre, Mainspace (125 Bathurst Street)
running time: 75 minutes (no intermission)
Jordan Baker in ‘Dana H.’, Photo by John Lauener