Stage: Blackbird

Victory Gardens Biograph Theater

Chicago

(773) 871-3000

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The second major American production of Blackbird firmly establishes David Harrower’s 2007 drama as “one of the best British plays of the decade,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. This superbly written, “clear-eyed” play explores the agonizing realities of sexual abuse. A young woman, Una, comes to the workplace of her former neighbor Ray to confront him about a “relationship” they had 15 years prior, when he was 40 and she was 12. The “harrowing” 90-minute conversation that follows is a raw “look at all sides” of the complex interaction between “a sexual predator and his prey.” Their relationship turns out to be much more complicated than merely that of an aggressor and his victim, and what makes this Blackbird fly is a “pair of deeply gutsy performances” from William Petersen and Mattie Hawkinson.

“A petite beauty of riveting intensity,” Hawkinson steals the show, said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Harrower’s play “very much belongs to” Una, and Hawkinson delivers a truly “knockout” performance in the role. Petersen, of CSI fame, “seems to lack the creepiness factor” you’d expect from Ray—though that may be precisely why director­ Dennis Zacek cast him in the role. “Ambivalence and ambiguity” are built into this play. Among the playwright’s more unsettling ­suggestions is that Una and Ray’s relationship, while improper and scarring, may have been the one “big passion of both their lives.” That’s one of the many “brutally honest sexual and emotional truths” offered up by Blackbird that are hard to face, even from the safety of your theater seat.