Dana H.
Opening Night: October 17, 2021
Theater: Lyceum Theatre
Dana H. tells the harrowing true story of a women held captive in a serires of Florida motels for five months. Told in Dana’s own words and reconstructed for the stage by her son, playwright Lucas Hnath, this groundbreaking work shatters the boundaries of the art form and challenges our understanding of good and evil.
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October 17, 2021
In Hnath’s play, the transcript is not dramatized as it is in those others, with actors speaking and performing each role. Rather, just one actor, Deirdre O’Connell, embodying Higginbotham, lip-syncs the entire 75-minute text, brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor.
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October 17, 2021
O’Connell is nothing less than astonishing. Long-form lip-sync is not new—one thinks of Bradford Louryk’s Christine Jorgensen Reveals, Lypsinka’s The Passion of the Crawford, much of the Wooster Group’s oeuvre—but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done quite so unshowily. This is a performance of virtuoso naturalism, radiant with inner life; the technique is so perfect that it disappears.
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October 17, 2021
But Dana’s words, and O’Connell’s performance that is by turns steely and vulnerable, goes to a deeper level of why and how. Her mesmerizing account of a five-month waking nightmare pulls us so deeply into the psyche of abuse that we fully comprehend the utter surrender, the no-way-outness.
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October 17, 2021
The show will have audiences leaning forward to hear each and every revelation — and, following this Broadway run, it seems likely to find welcoming homes in many cutting-edge venues around the country. Hnath has expertly crafted a piece of theater that is both raw and authentic yet at the same time one of artifice, and it is in this in-between plane that the audience lives.
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October 17, 2021
O’Connell here gives a performance that seamlessly blends an extraordinary technical acting challenge with the earthiness, plucky everywoman humanity and the subtle spirituality that have often been hallmarks of her work. Both play and performance are a gift we are lucky to receive, as this Broadway season shapes up to be a landmark one for its presentation of unconventional new plays and revelatory performances.
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October 17, 2021
Her performance is a rare combination of technical perfection and theatrical séance. For 75 minutes, she was Dana H; the voices did not come from speakers, but through her, like ghosts from the past making contact through a medium. Through O’Connell, we lived Dana’s story, as she relived hers, in her personal hell that’s a motel room in Florida.
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October 17, 2021
Some small productions work best in the spaces where they were built. Moving a play from a little theater to a big one is risky — an intimate show’s magic can fail when you try to scale up in size. Not so with Dana H., though, the unlikely crown jewel in this bizarre Broadway season. The breathless, brilliant show has somehow only gotten stronger in its Broadway transfer from the Vineyard Theatre, where its 2020 run was cut short by the pandemic.
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