Moments After Wake: HRDC's 'A Kind of Alaska'

UPDATED: February 14, 2017 at 5:40 p.m.

Just as bright lights and high-pitched ringing accost someone when waking up from a coma, they also ended the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club's production of “A Kind of Alaska.” HRDC put on Harold Pinter’s play in a cozy black box theater, in which director Thomas W. Peterson ’18 assembled a skilled cast for a simple production that successfully channeled all focus to the dialogue and actor’s expressions.

The play begins with Deborah (Eliya Smith ’20) as she wakes up after a twenty-nine year coma. Her doctor (Chloe A. Brooks ’19, an inactive Crimson editor), who is scripted as male but played by a female actress, accompanies her from her first moments of consciousness, filling in some gaps of information in spurts that still leave bouts of mystery. After a series of discussions and revelations, Deborah’s sister Pauline (Brooke E. Sweeney ’17) enters the room to reunite with her younger sister. This reunion illuminates facts hitherto unknown, and Deborah enters a frantic bout of physical motion and mental outcries. Lighting signals a shift. Scenes move from external experiences to those happening inside the mind. In the last few minutes, Deborah narrates her thoughts and reactions in chronological order, exiting the stage in a bath of light.

The cast impressively portrayed a spectrum of complex characters. Smith convincingly executed a challenging physical role that involved lying very still, standing up with partially atrophied limbs and enduring a crazed episode. She encapsulated Deborah’s mental confusion aptly as well: Her eyes often welled with tears and other times encapsulated laughter, and she conveyed Deborah’s sass and personality with grace. Both Brooks and Sweeney further energized the dialogue with clear facial expressions and deep gazes. Brooks’s doctor was both excited and sad. He was earnest in describing the truth of the world Deborah awoke to and his attempts to protect her from it. Deborah’s sister’s empathy was palpable, and her devotion even more so.

At some moments the crisscross of emotions was especially poignant. At others, the show fell flat. Lengthy moments of silence filled with fixed eye contact and wavering lips left something to be desired. At one point the doctor announces that he had not woken up Deborah earlier because he had not been able to obtain the right awakening fluid, a moment that should have been tragic but just sounded humorous.

Part of the reason the focus was on the actors’ facial expressions was the simplicity of the set. The stage was mostly empty with a few sporadically placed pieces of furniture: a hospital bed, a chair, and a table. The costumes were also minimalistic: a hospital gown dressed Deborah, the doctor wore a black outfit reminiscent of Steve Jobs and a doctor’s white coat, and Pauline wore a simple grey sweater and jeans. Each was distinct but not individually striking.

The lighting brought color to what would otherwise have been a black and white world. The changes in lighting facilitated the transition between the external world and the internal. The reliance on lighting, however, proved a little melodramatic. The signals were clear, but perhaps too well defined. Sound also accompanied transitions of light. The cutoff of background noise denoted the start; a high-pitched ringing prefigured the ending. These indicators combined with long silences notable only for intense gazes slowed down the pace of the production, which only displayed the show’s weaknesses. The expected occurred, and seemingly complex feelings remained superficial.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: February 14, 2017

A previous version of this article incorrectly indicated that "A Kind of Alaska" was an American Repertory Theater production.