Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, the 1983 two-hander from the dramatist John Patrick Shanley, is an odd choice for an off-Broadway revival in 2023. A short and bruising portrait of a doomed working-class romance in the Bronx, a kitchen-sink drama with wild emotional swings and ample domestic violence, it’s out of style with talky, cerebral or sociopolitically provocative contemporary theater. By the producers’ own admission, its abrasive, off-putting nature is part of the allure – “I want to be witnessing something I shouldn’t be witnessing,” Christopher Abbott, the play’s star and co-producer (along with the actor Sam Rockwell’s production company), told Vulture ahead of the show’s opening on Monday.
Indeed, as a first-time viewer of the play, I can confirm: by the end of this wearisome 80-minute show, directed by Jeff Ward, I did not want to be witnessing it, partly owing to a pair of overcooked performances and largely to the work’s shouty, alienating melodrama. As is often the case, the hook for this revival (its second, the other being in 2004) is star power: Abbott, arguably still most famous for his time on HBO’s Girls, shares the stage with his Black Bear co-star Aubrey Plaza, most recently of The White Lotus and long beloved from Parks and Recreation.
It’s Plaza’s stage debut, and you can tell. As Roberta, a divorced single mother boiling with self-loathing, Plaza is jittery and tentative, delivering the character’s harsh condemnation – of Abbott’s Danny, of herself, her family, everyone – in a too-rhythmic cadence. It’s a classic case of an excellent screen actor lost within full-body projection. On screen, Plaza, with her large hooded eyes, is a master of unnerving intensity and droll delivery; on stage, she is grasping for the play’s steep heights of emotion. Primarily, sweeping rage – out of her comfort zone, as well as the audience’s.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, to be fair, demands considerable actorly muscle – here, too much – to chew the play’s bloody gristle of emotions. Roberta meets Danny, a construction worker with a vicious temper, at a lonely dive bar in wintertime, lushly evoked by the scenic designer Scott Pask, with lighting by John Torres. A light, faintly bar-smelling stage fog hangs over the Lucille Lortel Theatre during their initial flirtation – barbs over half-drunk beers – and it’s briefly intoxicating. (The set design in general recalls the type of New York detritus – Christmas lights at a dive bar, old painted-over moldings – that is indistinguishable between now and 40 years ago. Same, too, for Arianne Phillips’s costuming – Danny in baggy Levi’s, a wife-beater and leather jacket, Roberta in a nondescript dress and then sexy slip.)
As these are two characters rippling with self-loathing, they summarily go for the jugular. Plaza has a better handle on Roberta’s nagging discomfort in her own skin than the play’s dialogue of pain and fury. He’s an overcompensating live wire; she’s better in silences. You’d always rather watch Plaza rather than listen, as she wears her Bronx accent like an ill-fitting jacket – awkwardly protruding at places, slipping off in others. Abbott fares better, though neither actor entirely sheds the unnatural patter of stage. It’s all mannered staccato, without the idiosyncrasies of real speech.
Which makes this revival’s one grand addition to the play, a sequence of original choreography between the two scenes, all the more relieving and fascinating. Choreographed by the husband-and-wife team of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, the wordless interlude imagines the book’s unwritten stretch between leaving the bar at each other’s throats and waking up together. Roberta and Danny dance, flirt, poke, prod, claw, open up, yearn; the movement functions as a metaphorical sex scene that becomes a more literal one on the floor (which unfortunately, from my vantage point in the mid-back orchestra, was difficult to see). It’s a strange, mesmerizing concoction of sweetness, ferocity, awkwardness and aggression that reveals more about the lovers, and the fine line between tender passion and violence, than anything said on stage.
Tough, when so much trauma and anger and insults are said, and so loudly. By show’s end, the play felt as lost as its flailing characters, despite the bright lights within it. Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is, as promised, challenging theater, just not in the good way.
