BWW Reviews: Vagabond Theatre Project's DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA is Unflinchingly Guttural and Stirring

The Vagabond Theatre Project is a University of Houston student run Production Company that focuses on bringing Houston audiences pieces of theatre that they feel passionate about. Though Vagabond Theatre Project, these intrepid students are expanding their educations and exploring the business aspects of the industry. With no permanent home, they move from space to space, building their resumes with laudable directorial, acting, stage managing, house managing, and producing credits.

Their latest venture is John Patrick Shanley's bittersweet, Bronx-based DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA. The Beauty and the Beast-like parable introduces audiences to Roberta and Danny, who are quite possibly the two most unhappy people in New York City. At the top of the 90-minute one-act, they are equally guarded and rather off-putting. Yet, John Patrick Shanley hooks us into their story, and we slowly see the layers stripped away. Their tumultuous and sensationalized encounter ventures towards the romantic, all the while maintaining the rough veneer brought on by the duo's squalor-ridden and dejected lives.

Direction by Anna Schulz conveys the immediacy written into the plot by John Patrick Shanley. Even before the characters speak, both of her actors draw the audience into the story with their electrifying charisma. As the play progresses, the performers adeptly fill the stage and entire venue with robust explosions of angst, grief, and guilt. Exposing their wounds to one another, Anna Schulz's cast purposefully overacts, ensuring the audience is treated to the fable-like qualities of the writing.

Danny, portrayed by Benjamin McLaughlin, is a fascinating composition of headstrong and brutish masculinity, always looking for his next fight. He begins the show in a place that is instinctually animalistic, immature, rough, and dangerous. Benjamin McLaughlin expertly conveys Danny as volatile and temperamental, exploding at the sound of a pin drop. He bangs tables, hits walls, yells, and threatens harm with a ruthlessly careless abandon. However, once the couple is out of the bar and tucked away in Roberta's ratty room in her mother's house, Benjamin McLaughlin expertly and slowly allows his Danny to divest himself of his sins and how everyone in his life has hurt him. His walls come crumbling down, finding sympathy and empathy from Roberta and the audience alike. Benjamin McLaughlin makes Danny's arc and remarkable change beautiful and elegiac, astounding the audience with his versatility, vulnerability, and artistry.

31-year-old Roberta, played by Shelby Blocker, has lived an inconsequential life of many abuses. In Shelby Blocker's hands she is exceedingly childish, having been forced to grow-up too quickly due to a pregnancy outside of wedlock at age 18 and for other more nefarious reasons. As she peels back her skin, Shelby Blocker crafts a character that enjoys having healthy doses of power in her relationships. This drive for power has led her to perform unthinkable actions. One action, more than the others, she feels ruined her family. She ravishes the hearts of the audience when she fully exposes how broken she feels because of her misdeeds. She fears her family can smell that she is garbage, explaining that is why they treat her so poorly. In moments like these, Shelby Blocker makes tangible Roberta's anxiety and the weight and emphasis she places on her own guilt. Her soul and heart are battered by everyone she knows and even by her own self; yet, she yearns for punishment, so she can find absolution for what she has done.

The third character in the play is not visible, but truly felt. That is the character of compassion and love. John Patrick Shanley, known for being a romantic of sorts, pristinely weaves this element into the words he writes, leaving it up to the director and cast to ensure that its presence is palpable. Both Benjamin McLaughlin's Danny and Shelby Blocker's Roberta fear love and emotionality because these aspects of human life are perceived as inexcusable weakness in their eyes. Yet, together they come to recognize that it takes great strength for the two of them to arrive at love and to forge any sort of bond between them. In this production, the emotionally and physically battered couple beats up on love, almost killing it several times. But, it does prevail in all the ways John Patrick Shanley intends it to.

Scenic Design by Shelby Blocker is minimalistic, emphasizing the seedy nature of the bar and the squalid conditions of Roberta's tiny room. She gives attention to the few details in the design, but she cleverly leaves large swaths of the stage barren to truly illustrate how destitute both the bar and Roberta's room really are.

Lighting Design by Robert Price creates darkly voluminous shadows for the first scene, really giving the impression of a dank dive bar. In Roberta's room, his artificial moonlight mirrors the script's wording well; however, it is his gradual shift from a city's night lighting to a dawning dusk that is handled the best, resplendently capturing the shifts in lighting that occur in the urban landscape.

Fight Direction by Parke Fech is stunningly visceral. The characters are incredibly physical with each other, adding a layer of discomfort to the performances with some rather realistic fight choreography.

Dialect Coaching by David Clayborn is not wholly convincing. Unfamiliar with this play coming into it, I was not sure where it took place until the characters stated they were in the Bronx. At first, I thought the cast was trying to convey broken Irish or even Boston-Irish accents.

Vagabond Theatre Project's presentation of John Patrick Shanley's DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA is stirring and evocative. This group of talented students from the University of Houston has plenty to be proud of. The unflinchingly guttural play has moments of true beauty and clarity, but does seem to ramble-a fault of the writing, in my opinion. It sent me home with mixed emotions and feelings, some of which are still up in the air for me. Despite this, I am truly happy to have experienced this production.

DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA runs at Obsidian Art Space through June 25, 2013. For more information and tickets, please call (979) 571 - 4933.

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