Darkness. Plunged into plunger black.
Darkness visible and darkness audible. Dark, doom laden blanket sound.
Light, spot light, on Mel, visibly shaken, utterly confused.
First word, “Dark”.
After a so alone solo – a soliloquy without solace – the space is infused with the fluro wash of a hospital waiting room replete with functional chairs and water cooler.
Mel’s daughter has been struck by a car, so Mel is an attendant for the medical prognosis.
A woman, Alex, dressed for business, is also in attendance, wanting to make acquaintance with Mel. Suspicion rises in Mel. Is Alex a cop, or worse, someone from DOCS?!
Apparently, she was the initial responder to the accident, administering makeshift first aid at the scene and has acquired a vested interest in the outcome and its consequences.
Their conversation lays the foundation themes in HURT by Catherine McKinnon – blame, guilt, frailty and forgiveness.
Enter Dominic, Mel’s estranged husband, father to their stricken daughter. A distillation of their domestic situation bubbles and boils, buried grief is exhumed, hidden motives revealed.
Catherine McKinnon’s script is a beautifully layered story, peeling the skin of the present, paring it down to the core of the past, performed, under Kim Hardwick’s adroit direction, by a trio of accomplished actors.
Meredith Penman gives a heart wrenching performance as Mel, a woman who doubts her ability to be a good mother, pondering whether it’s possible to believe in the soul without belief in God. She cherishes her children but their care seems overwhelming. Her rapid fire delivery of dialogue verges on the hysterical but is made empathetic rather than pathetic.
Gabrielle Scawthorn as Alex, by contrast, is calm, corporate calm, showing the inherent grace of the great tragedian.
Ivan Donato plays a pained and divided Dominic, distraught dad and deeply dark on his derelict spouse on whom he dumps the blame for his daughter’s delivery to death’s door.
Martin Kinnane’s lighting design illuminates the liminal space, a marvellous marriage between Isabel Hudson’s set design, with a low slung canopy of ceiling fluorescents, creating a clinical austerity.
Off stage a young girl is undergoing surgery, but here the scalpel is wielded on grievances built on grief and guilt, emotional fractures that have never adequately knitted.
Katelyn Shaw’s sound design is suitably brooding, distant thunder subliminal, and affecting primal scream.
McKinnon’s writing is complex and compulsive, unafraid of the poetic, but never prosaic, making HURT the hit it is.
White Box’s production of Catherine McKinnon’s HURT is playing the Old 505 Theatre, Level 1, 5 Eliza Street, Newtown until Saturday 23 July.