Harrowing true-crime tale done in lip sync
counselor in a Florida psychiatric ward when she was kidnapped by one of the patients, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. She was held captive by him in a series of motel rooms for five months.
Almost 20 years later, she recounted her story in painstakingly detailed audio recordings, which Hnath used to craft the taut, hypnotic one-woman show.
Actress Jordan Baker (ACT’s “The Normal Heart”) will perform the entire show in Berkeley without speaking; instead, she accomplishes a sustained act of virtuosic lip-syncing to Higginbotham’s actual recordings.
Hnath and Waters, who have worked together on three previous plays, including “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” aimed for something far more potent than verbatim mimicry with this arresting artistic choice, Waters told The Chronicle.
“We live at a time now where it’s crucial to question whose voices are heard” in the wake of trauma, he said, “and then how those voices are presented.”
Waters spoke by phone from his home in Berkeley about bringing true crime to the stage, his deep affinity for Hnath’s work and how satisfying it is to bring a production he’s proud of back home to the Bay Area. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Directing “Dana H.” in Berkeley following Broadway is the opposite of the trajectory that we’re used to with your work. You’ve more often developed a new play here and then taken it to New York. How does it feel?
A: It feels like coming home. I worked for Berkeley Rep for eight years and feel part of the Berkeley Rep community. We commissioned Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play),” which went to New York, and the West Coast premiere of Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” which went on to Yale (Repertory) and then New York. It’s very rewarding to have made a piece of work that I’m very proud of and to bring it back here.
Q: This is your fourth collaboration with Lucas Hnath. How helpful was it having a solid working relationship before embarking on the most personal play he’s written?
A: It’s hard to explain, but we have a deep trust in each other, and personally we get on. In addition to trusting each other and being committed to the work, we share a belief in simplicity, in reducing things to the minimum. It is a very good working relationship, and I hope there is more to come. We met at the Humana Festival (in 2012), when I joined Actors Theatre (of Louisville). I didn’t know who Lucas was, but his play was absolutely terrific. I thought he had an extraordinary voice.
Q: Any new play takes you inside the writer’s imagination, but since this play also takes you into his mother’s personal trauma, was the development process different?
A: You always have to respect that it happened to a real person, and that real person happens to be Lucas’ real mother. I didn’t meet Dana until a preview in L.A. and, in fact, chose not to meet her because I just wanted to work on the material. Lucas’ mom gave me this gift of her undeniably traumatic experience, her personal life, and in the end, like all survivor tales, it’s a story of triumph. Her story deserves enormous respect — from myself, the team around us and particularly the sound designer, Mikhail Fiksel (nominated for a Tony Award). He is the one who took the tapes you hear and edited them together.
Q: People don’t usually think of theater as the domain of true crime, which is such a popular genre in books, TV and podcasts. What does live theater have working in its favor for telling a story like this?
A: What’s unique to the theater is that it’s lipsynced live to the actual person’s voice. There are some theater groups, like the Wooster Group in New York, who lipsync at times to material, but this is a 75minute-long virtuoso piece of lip sync.
Q: Has anything about “Dana H.” particularly surprised you?
A: What really surprised me, particularly on Broadway, and after all theaters had been closed for two years, was the quality of listening. The listening to it has been profound. The usual rustling and coughing seems to have disappeared. There’s been a real attentiveness in the house from the audience that I find very striking and very moving, just a real sense of people being in a room together, really listening to this woman’s story.