We’re revisiting our conversation with O’Connell about this utterly unique play and her staggering performance in it. This interview has been updated with new material not previously posted.

“I didn’t know how to approach it exactly except that I knew the technical task is the thing I had no idea how to do.” So says award-winning actress Deirdre O’Connell of the challenges she faced when she accepted the role of “Dana” in Lucas Hnath’s Dana H. The play, which is not only based on transcripts of interviews his mother gave about a traumatic time in her life, is constructed with the audio of those interviews as well. Meaning O’Connell has to act the part while lip-synching to these recordings.

“I thought maybe that I would be able to learn it on the page – that’s the way I normally learn something, and that’s daunting – or I could just listen to it and learn the rhythms of it,” she  says by phone on her one day off recently. “I found after a few weeks of trying either that I had to do both at the same time. It may not be that way for anyone else, but doing one would erase the other. It’s like turning your brain into wet Kleenex.”

O’Connell is on stage alone for most of the show’s 75-minute run time. In order for this conceit to work, O’Connell has to make the audience forget they are watching her while hearing someone else.

“It is weirdly natural to me now,” she says. “I know the voice is not coming through my voice, but I do find the voice is coming through me and I’m breathing with her. I know I’m not making sounds, but I don’t feel the absence of it. It’s almost like I have a different way of making sounds than through the mouth. I feel it in my head because I’m hearing it it. It’s a really odd sensation.”

The role forces O’Connell not just to inhabit a character, but to think and perform as that character expresses herself through the recordings. It’s been a fascinating learning process for the actress.

“It was so interesting to realize how someone’s mind works and how they put thoughts together,” she revealed. “One thing leads to another for them and it is so unique and it is not the same as you. I finally had to surrender to trusting I would know it and forgiving myself if I didn’t. It’s been much more intense to perform as an emotional piece than to rehearse.”

Amongst the challenges O’Connell has been having to approach her analysis of the character far differently than she is accustomed to doing.

“It was literally going backwards from my usual process. In in a way, that’s why I wanted to do it. I wanted to unscramble my ideas of how people express themselves. It’s been great to surrender to someone else’s process and how someone protects themselves while they are telling a story. It was hell for a long time. A lot of hours and a lot of dark nights crying.”

Hnath’s mother, who was working as a a chaplain in a psych ward, was kidnapped and held hostage for several months by a patient named Jim who was recovering from a suicide attempt. In the interviews she did with Steve Cosson (also heard on the recordings in Dana H.), she tries to make sense of the whole experience. As carefully edited by Hnath, her answers give us a picture of not just a traumatized woman, but a complicated one as well.

“She talks a lot about the common symptoms of trauma victims,” O’Connell says of Dana. “The timeline is scrambled and she’s trying to be as precise as she can. First for her own ability to put it together correctly so she has the story right. But also because she wants it to be a very clear and understandable tale. But there are also times, especially early in the piece, where her state of mind moves very quickly. I love the way her mind works.”

In advance of the play’s opening, and this is the world premiere production of Dana H. at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, O’Connell told The Argonaut that she’d become an “empathy beast” doing the play. But what did she mean?

“I challenge anyone to have to do this particular task with anything and not have strange empathy for the person they’ve been putting into their head. It actually does something. It just seems to me you step out of the way and keep your own vanity at bay to know what someone is really thinking.”

O’Connell received an 2010 Ovation Award for her work at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Lisa Kron’s The Wake. In 2016 Kron’s described O’Connell as someone that “understands deeply that when people are speaking their words, what they’re saying is floating above and below and around the words and they are using the words to do other things.” I asked what she thought Dana, and by extension Lucas Hnath, were using these words for.

“I think her experience made her feel very isolated. I’m speaking for her and I feel uncomfortable because I’m not her. But I think part of the work of this play is to help her and, through her, other people who have felt that isolation. It’s a very isolating thing to have any off-the-grid violence happen to you. You feel like, ‘I’m not part of the regular civilized world anymore.’ This is a pretty civilized way to invite her back to the world.”

The unique performance of Dana H. leaves O’Connell thinking a lot about what she will do in the future with this role.

“It does feel like there is an infinite number of discoveries to be found. As a ride it’s pretty endless. I feel like it would be interesting to try to do a long run of it. It think you’d have to build breaks into it. the way the fatigue manifests itself is more like it sounds echo-y to me or I’m having a hard time hearing it right now. I could be wrong. It could be easier in terms of the doing it.”

The writer Aldous Huxley said “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” With Dana H. O’Connell is taking that private literature and making it very public while at the same time creating new memories for herself. What does she think the main thing she’ll take away from the experience of this play?

She pauses for a moment before answering. “I hope I can surrender. I’ve had to surrender a little of the control to do this. I’m a bit of a control freak. I hope I can keep doing that. I hope I can keep surrendering because it’s really scary surrounding to someone else’s heart and mind every day.”

For tickets to Dana H. on Broadway, please go here. Update: Dana H. and Is This A Room have announced a closing notice. The last performance on Broadway of Dana H. will be on November 13th. The last performance of Is This A Room will be on November 14th.

All photos are from the Center Theatre Group production at the Kirk Douglas Theatre (Photos by Craig Schwartz/Courtesy of Center Theatre Group)

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