‘Life’s but a walking shadow,’ times two
Did you know you die three times?
According to Abe — the deep-thinking character played by Jake Gyllenhaal, no less, in the depressing double-bill “Sea Wall/A Life” at the Public Theatre — you actually check out in triplicate.
Once when your body ceases to function. Once when they stick you in the ground. And — finally — after the last time someone speaks your name aloud.
Whee! What a fun night at the theater! I spent the following night lying in bed wondering which of the three was going to be the worst. Which would probably delight these particular writers.
“Sea Wall,” which is written by Simon Stephens and performed by Tom Sturridge, and "A Life,” penned by Nick Payne and acted by Gyllenhaal, would be heavy-duty monologues experienced individually. Seen together under the unstinting direction of Carrie Cracknell, they're enough to make you want to quit your job and run naked through the streets, if only to assuage the surety of the horrors that must lie ahead.
Stephens' monologue — hauntingly written — is all about the joy of marital love and parenting, until it turns into its macabre doppelganger. Death is nothing to fear, of course, but Stephens introduces something far darker even than our own inevitable expiration, which is the possibility that we might cause the death of an innocent through our own action, or negligence.
What darker fear is known to humanity than the notion that, one day, we might find ourselves to blame for an event that renders all of our good works irrelevant, a sudden reversal of fortune that means it would have been better if we had never lived at all?
Given the quality of the square-jawed Sturridge's acting, it's enough to make you shiver all the way to your bones. Perhaps better than any writer of his generation, Stephens knows how to seduce you with the quotidian, to make you believe you are watching ordinary people having an ordinary day until...wham! He kicks you in the teeth.
Better yet — or worse yet — he describes your nightmare in such a way as to make you feel like this is exactly how you would experience such an event yourself. You're watching such formidable writing, action and direction that the artifice of the theater is easy to forget. No escape for the punters into any fourth wall.
Payne's piece, at least, is about the timeless passing of the generations, homing in on something that many of us of a certain age have experienced — the birth of a child falling hard and fast upon the death of a parent. “A Life” is really about the cascading end of one existence and the beginning of another, and what it's like to be caught in the middle of the sadness of decline and the loving joy of birth — suddenly having what Edward Albee once called the “360-degree view.”