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Una and Ray, the principal characters in this unremittingly intense 80-minute one-act by Scottish playwright David Harrower, are birds with broken wings—psychologically crippled by an episode that left both their lives in tatters. She’s 27, he’s 56, and they’ve had a brief affair—about 15 years earlier, when he was 40 and she was 12. They haven’t seen each other since Ray was sent to prison for statutory rape (“blackbird” is British slang for “jailbird”). Una has endured a lifetime of being “talked about, pointed at, stared at,” while Ray has done his time, changed his name, moved to a new city, and rebuilt his life. Now called Peter, he’s the manager of a medical-supplies manufacturing firm. Una, who’s found him after stumbling across his photo in a trade magazine in her doctor’s office, has him cornered in the littered lunchroom of his workplace. But why? To accuse him? Humiliate him? Attack him? Hurt him? Kill him? Or to rekindle the relationship?
This compelling play demands complete commitment and honesty from its actors while testing their memory and concentration to the limit. In Dennis Zacek’s thoughtful, beautifully paced staging, every moment counts, as each answer raises new questions and each flash of insight raises the drama’s emotional stakes, building to a shocking final twist. Petersen’s haunting Ray—a man torn simultaneously by guilt and a lingering, aching passion—perfectly balances Hawkinson’s blistering, surgically precise Una, whose life is a constant, quietly desperate struggle with panic, depression, anger, and longing. Watching this duo warily face off, then relax to the point where they can share water from the same plastic bottle, is like watching two hostile animals as approach the same water hole. Lit by Jesse Klug, Dean Taucher’s lunchroom set comes complete with folding metal chairs, card tables, headache-inducing fluorescent lights, and garbage cans filled to overflowing with junk-food wrappers and soft-drink cans—a perfect metaphor for the emotional mess Ray has spent a lifetime trying to dispose of.
