DANA H
Lucas Hnath’s play DANA H, which just opened on Broadway, is wholly unlike anything else I’ve seen in a theater. The show tells the true story of the titular Dana’s kidnapping by her former patient; Dana had worked as a chaplain in a Florida hospital’s psych unit, and her patient was a white supremacist and meth addict. The story is fascinating, artfully told, and very upsetting. The tension in the piece is compounded by the revelation that Dana is actually the playwright Hnath’s mother, and that she purposely kept Hnath in the dark for the five months of her kidnapping and the subsequent two-and-a-half years she spent on the run afterward, hiding among a construction crew. What’s even more remarkable—if you can believe!—is that the entire piece is lip synced by the actress Deirdre O’Connell; she performs along with the track of an interview that Hnath conducted with his mother over several days in 2015. If it sounds gimmicky, I promise it isn’t. O’Connell is a captivating performer, and you will forget about the lip-syncing altogether within the first few minutes of the piece. I’m so happy that this harrowing, heartbreaking, but ultimately optimistic story has made its way to Broadway.
—Julia Hammer, Director of Production
