Theater Review: Two monologues on death at the Public Theater

Sea Wall

Written by Simon Stephens

A Life

Written by Nick Payne

Directed by Carrie Cracknell

Starring Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal

New York Public Theater

March 21, 2019

These two one actor/one act plays were ingeniously paired by the New York Public Theater, and featured prime acting talent. In Sea Wall (2008) English playwright Simon Stephens (b. 1971) tackles how a pretty normal guy processes the random death of his young daughter. The text leaps between past, present, and future, only revealing the actuality and circumstances of the death near the end of the 45 minutes. Stephens writes in a naturalistic style, relying on his actor, here the outstanding English actor Tom Sturridge, to supply the overtones, repressed pain and grief, and controlled emotion typical of how many men grieve. Sturridge’s great performance carefully tread the line between over-emotiveness and dysfunctional rationality. He adeptly portrayed a rational guy repressing and being overwhelmed by a great tragedy, and never resorted to stock theater gestures or melodrama in doing so. While very simple on the surface, using common language, the script addressed religion, science, and humanism/love as responses to grief without ever really committing to one as “the solution”. The result was a marvelously subtle treatment of a most difficult topic.

The second play A Life (2019) featured another British playwright (Nick Payne, b. 1984), this time starring our millennial version of the “normal guy” Jimmy Stewart, the versatile Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain). This play alternated reflections by an average guy on the death of a beloved father with the narrative of the birth of his first child. The writing was more overtly virtuosic than Sea Wall, veering rapidly between the two life events, often switching in mid-sentence like James Joyce would do it, pivoting the narratives on a phrase like “fifteen minutes” or “pale skin”. While both the play and the performance were more technically demanding than Sea Wall, I was less moved by them. The play did not achieve the naturalness and connection of the first play, so I admired it more as a virtuosic writing exercise, and was left without much of a take away message. But it was a pleasure to see a talented actor like Gyllenhaal pull it off.

Both plays were set on dark, spot lit stages with minimal props, and both had postmodern touches of breaking the fourth wall, as in when Sturridge set up his own props before Sea Wall or when Gyllenhall left the stage to quiet down some off stage noise during A Life. This sent the message that we are seeing real people, not actors, thus echoing the opening of the verismo opera Pagliacci (1892) when we are informed in the prologue that we are not seeing make believe characters, but real people. Director Carrie Cracknell rather effectively linked the two plays at the end, when Sturridge stood upstage staring into the distance (looking for his dead daughter?) as Gyllenhall sat at a piano downstage. The plays worked well as a set, and each should be a great test for auditioning young actors in the future.