My Variety Review: 'Dana H'
“I’m in this world but I’m not,” the middle-aged woman confesses to an unseen interviewer in Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.,” a mesmerizing solo show of theatrical shamanism that is receiving its Broadway bow.
The voice is that of Dana Higginbotham, assured yet apprehensive, matter-of-fact but, at times, also on a razor’s edge. It is also a voice lost in a haze of realities, roles and identities that will have audiences transfixed throughout the show’s 75 minutes.
After 17 years, Higginbotham is finally revealing her harrowing and traumatic underworld experience — by proxy. In an astonishing feat of actor-as-avatar, the recorded voice of Higginbotham is being lip-synched on stage by the extraordinary Deirdre O’Connell.
Giving the work yet another layer of the complexity, if not surreality, is the fact that Higginbotham is the mother of the playwright Hnath. In 1997, while Hnath was in college at NYU, Higginbotham was held hostage for five months. She was kidnapped by a former convict and member of a white supremacist brotherhood whom she counseled and mentored as a chaplain when he was in a psychiatric unit of a Florida hospital. The bond she had hoped to make on his road to redemption instead turned into a non-stop highway to hell.
Her mind-boggling story is one episode of shock after another: of a hospital’s irresponsibility, of police complicity, of a secret parallel world of guns, bombs, drugs and extreme violence, of a victim’s numbness as she is stripped in body and soul. (“You adapt to maladaption,” she says chillingly.)