Before the house opened on Saturday night, Culture Collective Studio founder Loni Berry told the audience that although the play we were about to see, David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole, revolved around the death of a four-year-old boy, it was all right to laugh from time to time. And laugh we did.
I first saw Rabbit Hole as a movie, adapted to the screen by Lindsay-Abaire and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. I do not remember laughing much, even at all. And even though I had liked the film, I left the cinema emotionally drained.
The play is far from heavy-hearted, and Berry gives himself, the actors and the designers permission to even be silly: the heavily pregnant Izzy (a hilarious and scene-stealing Imogen Lees) stacks biscuits on her belly as her family carries on an argument; Becca (Cherene Knop) gives her sister Izzy a kitschy bathroom set (the script actually says "very tasteful") for her birthday; their mother Nat (a very funny Charlie Tofte) shows up at her daughter's birthday party in a gaudy getup and is given to mumbling ironic asides.
I couldn't help comparing the play to the film and therefore feeling like I was watching a de-glamourised version of Rabbit Hole. This was not the beautiful, muted colour-palette-world of Mitchell's film, where grieving sometimes happens in gorgeous slow motion or close-ups with aching sounds of the piano and violin.
The humour and silliness that Berry has injected into the play makes the grieving process, of not only the parents of the dead boy but their entire family, feel more mundane. Grief is in their every word and gesture. It defines their every minor and major decision. Because Berry has allowed the play to be so funny and the audience to laugh so often, devastating moments in the play are weaved into the everyday and into our laughter.
Not that the pristine beauty of Mitchell's film made the story or the characters less relatable. It did not. The play is originally set in the wealthy town of Larchmont, New York. So the prettiness of the film and the people in it make sense.
In this production, the action takes place in Bangkok. When Berry set The Lisbon Traviata in the Thai capital, it worked. But here, the city doesn't make much sense for the play, especially when Berry has just made superficial changes to the names of places and nothing to the characters' background. The design choices may serve comedic purposes, but they confused me about the family's socio-economic status, something that was clear-cut in the film and the play script.
Despite the awkwardness that usually comes with English-speaking theatre in Thailand, Culture Collective Studio's Rabbit Hole is undeniably entertaining. But for a play that deals with such a devastating loss, we could do with moments that break our hearts or punch us in the guts.
Rabbit Hole
