Rabbit Hole
by David Lindsay-Abaire

Award nomination

Mixed Salad Productions is proud to be nominated for an ACColade - the annual awards presented by Adelaide's toughest audience, the critics.

We're a finalist in the Group Award for amateur theatre for our production of Rabbit Hole.

Director, Sally Putnam, is thrilled to receive this recognition of Mixed Salad's work.

"This is Mixed Salad's sixth nomination since we began in 2003, so we're quietly proud of our standard and our achievement," she beams.

The ACColades are the annual awards from the Adelaide Critics Circle, a group of around 20 working Adelaide critics, writing for the mainstream and alternative print and electronic media.

In recognition of the importance of amateur theatre in the community the critics, with the support of Coopers Brewery, support unpaid workers in the performing arts.

The awards are presented on 1 December 2008 at the Arts Theatre, 53 Angas Street, City.

On behalf of the cast and crew of Rabbit Hole, thanks to everyone who came to the show, everyone who helped to make the show a success and everyone who said lovely things about our production.

We're really proud of the production and are thrilled to have brought this new, brave, funny and moving play to South Australia.

We'd like to acknowledge the following people who each made a contribution to our season: Thanks to Sally Putnam, Jack Lukac, Julie Quick, Dave Simms, Anna Thomas, Tracey Walker, Nathan Smith, Karen Prior, David Wilson, Adrian Van Nunen, Print Matters, Richard Putnam, Rob Andrewartha, Di Howison, Robbie Kopp & Sue Wendt, John Lucas, Martha Lott and all at Holden St Theatres and Isaac Newberry.

Super organised Becca and her hard-working husband Howie seem to have everything a family could want - so why do they feel like they've fallen down a rabbit hole?

Everything looks so ordinary, but what's going on beneath the surface? And what is happening for the other members of the family – Becca’s younger sister Izzy and their overbearing mother, Nat?

These are some of the intriguing questions raised in the award-winning play, Rabbit Hole, by David Lindsay-Abaire which is being staged by Mixed Salad Productions at Holden Street Theatres from 10 September.

It is a moving, funny and brave drama, charting Becca and Howie’s bittersweet search for comfort after a family tragedy.

Mixed Salad Director Sally Putnam, said: “This is not an easy play for any company to tackle. We often block out the subject of grief, but we can learn a lot about ourselves from how we react in the darkest times. It’s at these moments that we find out who we are and discover how resilient we can be. Rabbit Hole is about carrying on and not giving up.

Rabbit Hole touches you without melodrama or saccharine sweetness. It’s a beautifully written story about real people and real emotions. I like the characters; they’re people the audience will care about.“

Lindsay-Abaire wrote Rabbit Hole after a fellow playwright told him to write a play about something that frightened him. The result was this witty, honest and compassionate play that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, considered the most prestigious prize for American playwriting. It also received five Tony nominations and is soon to be a movie starring Nicole Kidman.

Variety said that David Lindsay-Abaire had ‘crafted a drama that’s not just a departure but a revelation... laced with wit, insightfulness, compassion and searing honesty’. Entertainment Weekly commented: ‘Grade: A! A transcendent and deeply affecting new play.’

Starring Julie Quick, Dave Simms, Anna Thomas, Tracey Walker and introducing Jack Lukac, this South Australian premiere is presented by arrangement with Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd on behalf of Dramatists Play Service Inc New York.

The season runs from 10 – 27 September at Holden Street Theatres, Hindmarsh.

Performances are on Thursdays to Saturdays at 8.00pm, with sunset shows on Sunday 14, Sunday 21 and Wednesday 24 September at 6.30pm. Tickets: $25 or $18 concession.

Bookings: 0439 533 173, www.mixedsalad.com.au or Venuetix.

Grief is a time bomb with a hidden trigger.

David Lindsay-Abaire's exploration of a nuclear family imploding is a lesson in what lies beneath the veneer of a family dealing with tragedy.

Becca and Howie are a nice upper middle class couple whose well-off, well-ordered world is crumbling. The loss of their young son to a terrible accident is pushing their relationship to breaking point.

And the arrival of Becca's wayward sister Izzy and smothering mother Nat just widens the cracks.

On a superbly designed set, Sally Putnam evokes excellent performances from a very even ensemble.

Dave Simms is in fine form as the hapless Howie, who can do no right as he tries to move their lives on. Tracey Walker is heart-wrenching as the detached Becca, gripped by a relentless grief that sucks the warmth from her soul.

Anna Thomas scores as erratic, on-the-wagon Izzy destined for untimely motherhood, and Julie Quick is terrific as their motor-mouthed mother Nat.

The find of the night is newcomer Jack Lukac as Jason, a young man seeking redemption for a mistake he cannot undo.

This is a fine night out, complete with lighter moments to carry the audience through every family's worst nightmare.

Matt Byrne, Sunday Mail, 21 September 2008

'Rabbit Hole' is a surprising, rich piece of theatre about the most difficult of subjects, the accidental death of a child and the impact that has on the family left behind.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire's script is as steeped in humour as it is unsentimentally insightful. His writing and characterisations are a solid study in careful understatement that nonetheless, offers room enough to go too hard.

Director Sally Putnam has wisely chosen not to do so, instead opting to ensure there's an evenly balanced pace to the work that allows an easy, natural flowing production highlighting the innate humanity and comic frailty of the characters.

In two acts, divided by a two-month period, Lindsay-Abaire's script chronicles the emotional and psychological struggles of a family trying to deal with the loss of Becca and Howie's son Danny.

Becca (Tracey Walker) and husband Howie (Dave Simms) to all intents seem to on a safe path eight months after their son's death. But they're not. Buried beneath everyday life are rituals and things unsaid indicating otherwise, and this also goes for Becca's mother Nat (Julie Quick) and sister Izzy (Anna Thomas). Hovering on the sidelines is the young boy Jason (Jack Lukac) whose car hit Danny.

Lindsay-Abaire's subtlety as a writer extends to offering catalysts in the most intelligent way. Izzy, not exactly the most 'mature' of people, and rather headstrong, announces she is pregnant to a new boyfriend and intends keeping her baby - sparking deep, barely suppressed emotional responses from Becca.

In performance and direction, the production is flawless.

Tracey Walker and Dave Simms are magnificent in their ability to show us an every day couple living an every day life that is nonetheless forcing them to almost part. Anna Thomas' Izzy subtly develops the sense of being the odd one out, while the determined, persistent efforts by Juile Quick's Nat to bring a healing to Becca and Howie is as tragic as it seems doomed.

Putnams's softly lit, comfy and neutral coloured set really allows the action to be felt, pondered and absorbed all the more and the rich humour to be savoured.

Healing is very much at the centre of the piece. How to get there is not provided as a given by Lindsay-Abaire and Putnam's production respects this open ended element of the writing.

'Rabbit Hole' is a magnificent, brave and human piece of writing gifted to us in a production you can't but help embrace enthusiastically.

David O'Brien, dB Magazine, 20 September 2008

Simply the best

This is simply the best new play staged in Adelaide this year in a performance that really tugs at your heart and then with immense theatrical confidence fills that heart with faith in the future.

The accidental death of a child can tear a family a part with grief and guilt. Life goes around them in a house filled with memories, baby clothes, stuffed toys.

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer prize winning 2007 play takes the audience right into the lounge room of a family struggling with loss. The small Studio Theatre at Holden Street has been made smaller and more intimate.

The play is frequently very funny. The audience laughter is genuine, and slides into melancholy and reflection so easily, a tribute to the playwright’s skill at construction and observation, and the subtle and well rounded performance’s of the cast.

Dave Simms and Tracey Walker are Howie and Becca, bereaved parents dealing with the loss of their young child with differing and almost mutually incomprehensible attitudes. She is numb with grief, only eight months later folding the child’s clothes. He bottles up his rage until a videotape is wiped and he loses the sight and sound of his child.

Anna Thomas, the footloose younger sister gives a pitch perfect performance of a bubbly and irresponsible free spirit, and Julie Quick transcends caricature as Nat, the mother infatuated with fate and the Kennedy family.

Jack Lukac takes the difficult role of the teenager driver at the heart of the tragedy and plays it straight and sincere. Sally Putnam has encouraged her cast into a really impressive assumption of difficult roles, played here with grace.

Unlike so many recent new plays, Rabbit Hole trusts the audience to pick up on what is happening quickly and ends beautifully at exactly the right moment to allow characters and audience to go on with their lives changed by the experience of two hours in the theatre.

Mixed Salad are to be thanked mightily for finding this play so soon after it’s premiere in the States and bringing it to Adelaide. One word of caution. You may wake up the following morning having dreamed of someone you loved and lost. I did.

Only a century ago the death of a child was a routine event. Today we consider it an anomaly that deeply affects the survivors.

In his Pulitzer Prize winning play Rabbit Hole David Lindsay-Abaire imagines living with the death of a child - with empathy. Sally Putnam directs Rabbit Hole for Mixed Salad Productions at The Studio of the Holden Street Theatres.

I need to declare my bias; I lost my daughter Julie in her seventeenth year to a murderer - twice - once in January 1977 and again when her body was found in the bush at Truro in 1979. Last week I was pestered by the media because the convicted murderer James Miller was admitted to hospital with terminal cancer. I went to see Rabbit Hole on Thursday prepared to weep but I laughed a lot more.

Rabbit Hole is a gentle, subtle and superbly structured play that looks at the way that different people handle grief over the death of a loved child. The first year is especially difficult. Lindsay-Abaire skilfully takes us through the grieving process of the people nearest to Danny, a four-year-old who ran into a street after his dog and got killed by a car driven by a teenage driver.

It is eight months since Danny's death and the parents, Beccy and Howie are still quietly dancing around each other without fully expressing their feelings. Beccy, Tracey Walker, is a highly organised professional woman who has taken time off work to be a mother and Howie, Dave Simms, is a pedantic, intelligent man who tries to cover his feelings by becoming obsessive and finding ever more abstruse issues to explore. I totally identified with both.

As if to add fuel to the potentially explosive state Beccy's sister Izzy, Anna Thomas, has happily become pregnant. Beccy is torn between joy and bitter resentment that is not helped by the fact that Izzy told their mother Nat, Julie Quick, before telling Beccy. To further complicate things the teenage driver Jason, Jack Luka_, is deeply troubled by the accident and looking for absolution from the parents.

Lindsay-Abaire takes a soap opera situation and endows it with sensitive humanity to produce a play that got me totally involved even if it brought up some unpleasant memories. The events of the play crept up on me and etched themselves into my memory with images like the two sisters sorting Danny's clothes where the seemingly mundane conversation is loaded with emotional dynamite; Howie's not so subtle attempt at seducing Beccy; and Nat's rave about fate.

The company's work is well suited to create an appropriate mood both in the serious and the comic aspect. And there is a lot of humour in Rabbit Hole that reflects the reference to Alice falling through a rabbit hole into wonderland. If Alice's fall was thrilling it was also very secure; and there is a sense of security in the love that is clearly evident between Beccy and Howie. The beige modern unit set of a lounge and eating area is comforting and works well to keep the action flowing smoothly. Sally Putnam's direction has helped all the actors to focus on their characters.

Tracey Walker gives us Beccy's quiet desperation as a permanent pall with flashes of funny, wry humanity; Dave Simms shows that Howie's attempt at bringing some normalcy to their lives is just as desperate especially when Howie loses it because Beccy has accidentally erased a tape of Danny at play. Nat, the girls' mother, is also hurting and Julie Quick shows this in Nat's tirade against fate and the Kennedys that is as apposite as it is awkwardly funny. Anna Thomas as Izzy that deliberately rhymes with dizzy gave a nicely shaped performance. Jack Luka_ is nicely compassionate as Jason, the teenage driver, when he talks to Beccy of fictional parallel universes.

Edward Albee said that a playwright has to choose where to put the parentheses around the lives of the characters. In Rabbit Hole David Lindsay-Abaire has got the parentheses absolutely right.

Alright, I did relive some of my less pleasant experiences in watching Rabbit Hole. But that did not blind me to the experience of this performance. The actors need to be a little less deliberate in their delivery because they currently show some of the under-structure of the play and that brings unnecessary attention to its devices, but that will probably improve. I would urge you to experience the two hours with Rabbit Hole that I'm sure you will enjoy. Who knows, you too might find some tears among the laughter.

With its latest production, Mixed Salad Productions brings us a play that only premiered on Broadway in February of 2006.

In doing so, the company takes a substantial risk, because there is not a ready-made audience of people familiar with the play. The flip side of that is that the audience does not arrive with preconceived notions of how things should be done.

This is a play that deals with how people cope with loss, and often seek others to blame for their loss. As well as being moving, it is amusing and enjoyable.

Director, Sally Putnam, has assembled a cast of widely varying experience, and has done so very successfully.

Dave Simms, always a good performer, gives one of his finest performances as Howie. Tracey Walker, as Becca, the wife, also produces a fine performance. This is a role that would be very easy to overdo; that would end up pushing the character away from reality. Walker never once falls into this trap.

Julie Quick, as Nat, also produces a character that is exceptionally realistic, with a wonderful combination of humour and emotion. Anna Thomas, as Izzy, Becca's sister, has not been on stage for a number of years, and that has been theatre's loss.

The real surprise in the cast is young Jack Lukac. He has some of the hardest work to do; his first appearance is a monologue that requires him to connect with the audience and explain the reason for his being there, whilst receiving no support from other cast members. He does this very well. The only downside is that his scene with Walker in Act II is presented in such a way that he spends too much time facing away from the audience just when his character needs to be seen by them.

For some strange reason, the set design, and the lighting design and operation receive no credit in the programme. That is a pity, because the set, while quite simple in concept, is a clever addition to the emotional level of the script and well complemented by the lighting. Some scene changes take place with blue light, and some in the pitch black, making it a little difficult for the cast.

If the criticisms here seem very minor, that is because they are.

This is a brilliant production and should not be missed.

Mixed Salad Productions has shown exactly why David Lindsay-Abaire’s tenderhearted play Rabbit Hole won a Pulitzer Prize, was performed on Broadway and is now being adapted into a film.

Lindsay-Abaire’s brilliant script tenderly exposes the depths of human grief without, for a moment, becoming mawkish or sentimental, and almost miraculously in the face of tragedy this play is also poignantly funny.

Director Sally Putnam has made an inspired choice with this award-winning script, and has maintained just the right balance throughout.

This is a drama that uses silence as well as words to portray the pain expressed by each person whose life has been touched by tragedy. In the wrong hands it could easily have been a maudlin tissue box affair. Putnam’s version certainly requires tissue in hand, but it portrays the anguish with truth and tact, a touch of humour, and a lot of love. The timing and acting of the excellent ensemble, under Putnam’s deft hand, add to the poignancy and power of this play’s candid portrayal of grief.

Tracey Walker takes the role of Becca, a mother grieving the loss of her child in a freak accident. This is a role that was played by Cynthia Nixon (Miranda in "Sex and the City") on Broadway and is to be played in a big screen version by Nicole Kidman. It is also a role that demands fine distinctions. Walker is brilliant as she portrays a mother brittle and bitter with grief, grappling with overwhelming sorrow. Her sadness is palpable, underlying every expression and action, as she bravely struggles to mourn her loss and maintain some sense of normalcy. Walker portrays this courageous, contained and somewhat controlling Becca in a manner in which encourages empathy.

Dave Simms is equally adept as husband Howie, who turns to others to help him with his grief. Howie’s warmth and humour shine through and provide a wonderful paradox to Becca, depicting the different ways in which people cope with loss.

This tragedy, like many, touches the lives of each member of the family and Julie Quick is delightfully idiosynchratic as the grandmother, as is Anna Thomas as the dizzy Izzy.

Jack Lukac is astounding as the innocent, troubled and tender-hearted Jason.

It would be easy to get the impression that this is a tragic story only for the brave-hearted, but this is not true. Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is sad, but it is also oddly optimistic, portraying the strength and love that lies within each human being. This unusual drama is also about love and laughter in the face of grief.

This is no rabbit hole down which Alice follows the White Rabbit, this is a “The Matrix” like metaphor which encourages a funny and engaging view of the real world.