Rabbit Hole

My friend Ken took me to see Rabbit Hole, the new play by David Lindsay-Abaire, starring Cynthia Nixon, Tyne Dale and John Slattery. I loved it. The acting is incredibly nuanced, and considering the subject matter--a four-year old is hit by a car and killed, and the family must then deal with their individual paths through grief--it's also very funny.

At one point in the second act, Ms. Nixon asks her mother--who in the play, eleven years earlier, lost her son, Ms. Nixon's brother--if "this feeling" ever goes away. Ms. Daly says that eventually you are able to crawl out from underneath it, and then you carry it in your pocket like a brick. Some days you forget about it, and then you reach in and you're reminded, "oh yeah, that."

So much of the play felt like my own experience with Meg's death. (It did occur to me at one point that everyone around me, all the other people crying, were probably thinking that the play felt like their experiences, as well; such is the brilliance of the writing; and such is the nature of grief.) How sometimes you feel like moons orbiting the people you love, empty space spanning the distance between you, impassible. How the objects left behind are both exalted to a new level of preciousness, and yet you carefully remove the reminders from your immediate view, because to have the person staring back at you from the outside is often too much.

So. Run, don't walk, to see Rabbit Hole if you're anywhere near.