Steppin' Out

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Playwright finds a Pulitzer down the 'Rabbit Hole'

By Heather Zimmerman

When playwright David Lindsay-Abaire wrote the drama Rabbit Hole, he was simply setting himself a challenge to write a play in a style new to him. Talk about meeting a challenge: In April, Rabbit Hole won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

South Bay audiences can catch this play on stage at the San Jose Repertory Theatre, where Rabbit Hole runs through June 10 at 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose.

The play examines how a couple, Becca and Howie, copes with grief following the death of their 4-year-old son in an accident. Rabbit Hole also adds other family members into the mix, Becca's mother and sister, who each bring their own emotional baggage to the grieving household.

"In terms of execution, it was obviously a departure for me," Lindsay-Abaire says of Rabbit Hole's realistic style "There is a lot of funny stuff in Rabbit Hole and I think the humor in the play serves it well. But most people wouldn't describe it as a comedy. Look at any of my other plays and people would say 'Yes, those are comedies.' "

In fact, Lindsay-Abaire has been best known for absurdist comedies, which often explore such weighty topics as personal identity and family dysfunction, but in a humorous, surreal way. His comedy Fuddy Meers, for example, features an amnesiac protagonist who loses her memory on a daily basis and a man so repressed that he often speaks through a sock puppet.

"I very deliberately wrote a play that wasn't a comedy. I've never written a naturalistic, straightforward conventional play. That was more a challenge to myself. I used to make fun of those plays," Lindsay-Abaire says of Rabbit Hole. "Then I got a little older and I said, 'Wait a minute, there are some good naturalistic, conventional plays. Could I even write one?' I just sort of put the task in front of myself, to see if I could do it. And then I waited for a topic to present itself that could be a naturalistic play."

Rabbit Hole's subject matter derived from the advice of Lindsay-Abaire's former playwriting teacher Marsha Norman, who had once told him to write about his worst fear. The playwright, who has a young son, says contemplating such a devastating scenario was difficult, but that as writer, he also had sufficient distance from the situation to be able to write the play.

"As it was, it was of course, incredibly painful to write it, but at the same time, I could go upstairs and hug my son when the going got rough," Lindsay-Abaire says. "For me, too, it wasn't just about a parent losing a child. The play is about loss and grief, and so in addition to imagining the worst possible thing, the loss of my son, I also went to the well of grief, which I have experienced. I've lost friends and family close to me, so that material was very accessible."

In the tradition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the term "rabbit hole" is often used to describe a passageway into alternate universes, a concept that is touched on both literally and figuratively in Rabbit Hole.

In that way, Lindsay-Abaire says the play explores themes common throughout his body of work, albeit in a new way. "Obviously Rabbit Hole is my first naturalistic play, but in my comedies as well, it's always about characters waking up in a world that seems unrecognizable to them and trying to find their way through a very strange, upside down world," he says.

As a writer, Lindsay-Abaire himself is currently occupying several different artistic universes with his work on a variety of projects for theater and film, including writing the book for a musical based on the film High Fidelity. He also wrote the film adaptation of Cornelia Funke's young-adult fantasy book, Inkheart. The film, which stars Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent, will be released next spring.

"I'm diversifying my portfolio," he says with a laugh. "I love to take jobs doing things I've never done before."

Currently, Lindsay-Abaire is writing the book and lyrics for a Broadway musical version of Shrek, something he says is a "tremendous amount of fun." He is also writing the film adaptation of Rabbit Hole, which has been optioned by actress Nicole Kidman. She is slated to star as Becca, and also plans to produce the film.

Tickets are $28-$56. For more information, call 408.367.7255 or visit www.sjrep.com.