Lots of laughs in this tearjerker

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is billed as a story about a couple whose relationship undergoes monumental changes after their preschool son is killed in an accident.

The death of a child is the most sorrowful experience a parent can undergo. Yet it might come as a surprise to audiences that in the Edmonton premiere tonight at Walterdale Playhouse, there are a great deal of laughs paralleling the loss.

“This is a real family. It doesn’t focus on the trauma. It deals with the relationships in the aftermath,” explains assistant director Marissa Loewen, a former St. Albert resident.

Lindsay-Abaire, who has developed a reputation in the New York theatre scene for absurdist plays and zany characters, uses a softer comedic touch for the heavy material in Rabbit Hole. “All of his plays are set to make people laugh in spite of the sad situation.”

This Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright wrote this play after remembering a college instructor that challenged him to write about what he feared most. As a father of two, Lindsay-Abaire’s greatest fear was losing a child.

The play is set several months after four-year-old Danny chases a dog onto the street and is accidentally killed by a young driver who swerves to miss the pet.

The entire family life is thrown off-kilter. His grief-stricken mother Becca (Joyce Labriola), a tightly wound homemaker, deals with the pain by packing up Danny’s things and trying to sell the house. “She’s closed herself off for the most part.”

Instead, her husband Howie (Daniel J. Summers), wallows in the house’s reminders of Danny. “He wants to keep everything from the painting on the fridge to the fingerprints on the door.”

They are both in a void that tugs and creates friction. As Becca says to Howie, “You’re not in a better place than I am. You’re just in a different place and that sucks because we can’t be there for each other.”

Despite the couple’s emotional pain, much of the comic relief develops from Becca’s pregnant sister Izzy (Amelia Duplessis) and her over-the-top mother Nat (Francie Goodwin-Davies).

“In one of the first scenes, Izzy tells her sister about a bar fight and is extremely proud she punched a woman that is the girlfriend of her father’s child. She describes it with such energy and Becca, who is so controlled is aghast her sister would do this.”

However Becca finds her way when she meets Jason, the young man who accidentally killed Danny. Jason also has difficulty coping with his actions and is writing a story he dedicates to Danny. Graham Mothersill and St. Albert’s Quinn Hinch, a St. Albert Catholic High graduate, alternate in the role of Jason.

“This play isn’t going to be a downer. It’s going to be real. Even though I never lost a child, I felt I could be part of this family, that it could happen in any life.”