Theatre 2024: Dana H

What a strange feeling to be absolutely horrified yet totally mesmerized at the same time while watching a play.  Such were the emotions invoked while watching Dana H, a verbatim play with a twist.  Prior to this, my only experience with verbatim plays was with the 2014 musical London Road where the lyrics of all the songs were taken directly from interviews with citizens from Ipswich, U.K. as they commented on their thoughts about the serial killer that was plaguing their town.

Crow's Theatre's production of Dana H., which premiered on Broadway in 2019, takes the concept of a verbatim play to the next level.  All the dialogue in this one-woman show is taken from interviews with Dana Higginbotham, a chaplain from Florida who describes her ordeal of being kidnapped by psychiatric inmate Jim, a white-supremist neo-Nazi member of the Aryan Brotherhood who held her hostage for 5 months back in 1997.  We hear about how Dana meets, councils and advocates for the violent, deranged man, who repays her compassion by capturing her and dragging her from one seedy motel after another as they head south-west across the country.  She speaks mostly in a calm, dispassionate, almost emotionless manner as she details being abused both mentally and physically, only breaking down slightly when she recalls being brutally raped and assaulted.  For this memory, she shakily reads lines from a manuscript that she has written about her traumatic experiences.  Most appalling are her descriptions of the pair’s interactions with policemen during their travels, who she claims recognized her plight and saw her bruises but were too afraid of Jim’s Aryan Brotherhood association to provide her with much, if any, help.  The Aryan Brotherhood is described in Wikipedia as a neo-Nazi prison gang and organized crime syndicate with immense powers both inside and outside of the prison systems within the United States.

Playing the titular role, actress Jordan Baker enters a set that is made to represent one of the seedy motel rooms where Dana was held captive.  The décor is perfect, right down to the grime that can be seen on the walls, the filthy air-conditioning unit, and the tacky painting hanging above the bed.  Baker enters through the “front door” of the motel and sits down on the chair positioned centre stage facing the audience.  A sound technician follows and makes a point of helping her put on her earpiece.  Then we hear the voice of the interviewer ask his first question and the play begins as Dana opens her mouth to answer.

But rather than Baker reciting the lines from this interview, what the audience hears is an edited-together version of the audio interviews with a male voice asking the questions and Dana Higginbotham’s actual voice as she responds.  Baker lip-syncs in perfect timing to the audio, not only mouthing the words but mirroring the tone and context of the content with the appropriate facial expressions and body movements that include tapping of the chair or her thigh, rustling of paper or drinking from a water bottle, all in sync with the sounds generated from that audio.   As we were seated about 5 rows away from the elevated stage, my husband Rich and I had a clear view of Baker’s face and at first we concentrated on the exaggerated motions of her lips as she mouthed the words.  Very quickly after, we became so immersed in the story and the perfect execution of the lip-syncing that we totally forgot that the actress was not actually speaking.

Towards the end of this one-act play, shortly after describing the horrific description of Dana’s rape, the stage went black and when the lights came back on, the room was empty and the bed disheveled.  After a few seconds, there was a knock and then a maid came in and calmly went about cleaning the room and making the bed, all while multiple audios of Dana’s voice continued to play in a dissonant, jumbled manner.  The payoff of the scene came when the maid removed the bedsheet which revealed a huge blood stain.  With no reaction at all, she just added it to the pile of dirty laundry and left.  The scene seemed to serve two purposes.  From a practical perspective, it allowed Baker to rest off-stage for a few minutes.  In terms of the narrative, I guess it indicated how that area had become inured to violence and bloodshed as if it was an everyday occurrence.

The play Dana H. was written by Higginbotham’s real-life son Lucas Hnath, an acclaimed playwright known for penning A Doll House Part 2, a sequel to Ibsen’s classic play, The Doll House.  While the play describes Dana’s rescue and escape, as well as her eventual spiritual healing and new role in hospice end-of-life counselling, it does not describe how Dana reunited with Lucas nor how the ideas for the interviews and subsequent play came about.  The conceit of using his mother’s own voice to narrate her own story lends authenticity to the tale, making it all the more harrowing and impactful.

Whenever possible, I select the performance of a play that holds a post-show talkback in order to gain more insight regarding what I just watched.  This was more important than ever after watching Dana H since this performance was the most unique and unlike anything that I ever watched before. Hosted by Crow’s Theatre’s assistant director Paolo Santalucia, the talkback allowed us to hear the real voice of actress Jordan Baker and learn about her process in preparing for this challenging role.

Baker described the lip-syncing process to be almost like a dance, as she had to marry not just the enunciation of the words but also the body movements and emotions behind them.  While sitting on stage, in order to concentrate and listen as deeply as required to sync up with the sounds of Dana’s voice coming through her earpiece, Baker is put in what she describes as a “bubble”.  The lighting is set in such a way that she cannot see the audience and stares out at darkness.  The earphones block out all external sounds in order to further eliminate distractions.  Baker recalled one performance where the lights malfunctioned and she could actually see the audience as they shifted, coughed, reached for candy and so forth.  That made it exponentially more difficult for her to get through the show.  In terms of miming the actions such as slapping of the chair, she had to make sure not to actually hit the chair and make a second noise in addition to the one coming from the audio.  She explained how this play first made it to Broadway since under normal circumstances, such an avant-garde, intimate and intense show would have been relegated to Off-Broadway.  But it premiered during COVID when theatres were looking for shows with few actors in order to control the spread of the disease.  Baker was worried about whether she could carry what would be her first one-woman show, let alone one that required such a radically different technical performance.  She needs to wonder no more, as she was terrific.