Review
DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
Rogues Theatre
Starring Christianne Hirt and Kurtis Sanheim
Written by John Patrick Shanley
Directed by Joe-Norman Shaw
Runs until May 28
Pumphouse Theatres
"Love is a Battlefield," that Pat Benatar song from the ’80s, would be a great theme for John Patrick Shanley’s 1984 one-act play, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. In Shanley’s bellicose romantic drama – now at the Pumphouse in a fine revival by Rogues Theatre – two lonely strangers meet in a Bronx bar and proceed to shout, shove, slap and throttle their way toward affection and understanding.
Danny (Kurtis Sanheim) is a violence-prone trucker who can’t seem to go anywhere without getting into a fight. "I’m peaceful, but people fuck with me," is his comic-pathetic explanation as he sits alone at his table, his face and fists scarred from his latest brawls. Incandescent with rage and self-loathing, he swears he’ll blow his brains out when he turns 30.
Roberta (Christianne Hirt) also hates herself and must have a death wish, too – why else would she taunt and slap around the volatile Danny, like a cat toying with a live hand grenade? She’s a bitter single mom living with parents she detests and harbouring an ugly family secret that she hurls down like a gauntlet before she and Danny have barely met each other. If the very thought of it doesn’t make him puke, then maybe they stand a chance as lovers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they do eventually wind up in her bed, where they take off the boxing gloves and reveal their gentle and vulnerable sides. But both are so consumed with fear and shame that more punches have to be thrown before there’s any hint of a happy ending.
It’s a good time to be revisiting the work of veteran New York playwright Shanley, best known outside theatre circles for writing the Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck. His most recent play, Doubt, about a Catholic priest suspected of pedophilia, is currently running on Broadway and won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Danny, which made its debut more than two decades ago (with John Turturro in the title role), shows that same willingness to take unpleasant characters and make us understand, if not feel for, them.
Joe-Norman Shaw’s production picks up on that gutsy spirit. When we meet Danny and Roberta, smoking and slugging back beer in a crummy bar, they look like the kind of people you wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Sanheim’s rugged, authentically dangerous-looking Danny, blood on his knuckles, quivers like a bomb about to explode. Hirt’s heavyset, hard-faced Roberta is about as inviting as a bale of barbed wire. But by the end of a short, taut 70 minutes, they are shown to be sad, wounded people that you pity and wish the best for.
Aside from running Rogues Theatre and its acting studio, married couple Hirt and Shaw have a wealth of film credits between them and there’s a cinematic realism in the casting of this show. You don’t have to suspend much disbelief with these actors. Sanheim’s got the buff build of a guy who could hold his own in a fistfight and, when he strips off his shirt, his muscles are emblazoned with real (or at the least, very realistic) tattoos. Hirt looks like she could’ve wandered out of the Cecil Hotel after last call. Their New York accents are dead-on and their performances are as gritty and convincing as Shanley’s dialogue, which shifts from splashes of obscenity-spiked vitriol to tenderness and even a rough poetry without ever sounding false.
If there’s a weak spot, it’s that the wound-up Hirt and Sanheim sometimes bite off and spit out these lines too quickly. In particular, Danny’s description of finding solace in a starry sky by creating his own constellation is a thing of beauty that’s almost lost in Sanheim’s brusque delivery.
The characters’ raw, dingy lives are reflected in Brad Leavitt’s rudimentary set, but when morning comes, he fills Roberta’s tiny room with warm lighting and there’s a shimmer of birdsong, signalling the promise of a new beginning for these damaged creatures. And if there’s hope for Danny and Roberta, there’s hope for everyone. |
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