Blackbird

OLDER AND WISER The grown-up Pill and Daniels hash out their past.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

The title of Blackbird is never explained in David Harrower’s astringent character study of a former child molester named Ray—embodied by the deceptively regular-guyish Jeff Daniels—and his now-adult victim, Una, played by Alison Pill. But as the bitter Pill confronts her erstwhile paramour, one is reminded of the Beatles song also called “Blackbird”: “Take these broken wings and learn to fly / All your life you were only waiting for this moment to arise.” After years of searching, Una has tracked Ray down; he insists that he was never a predator, and that her 12-year-old body was the only such one he ever touched. But how high can Una’s mended wings take her? And can she handle her history from a bird’s-eye view?

Like other recent plays and films—Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt and Todd Solondz’s Happiness among them—Blackbird aims to particularize and complicate the question of consent as it applies to pedophiliac relationships. (Una’s name recalls that of Charlie Chaplin’s legal teenage bride, Oona O’Neill.) The play unfolds in real time, in a garbage-strewn corporate conference room, designed with meticulous verisimilitude by Scott Pask. At first, Blackbird resembles a drama-therapy fantasy of confrontation, but Joe Mantello’s production gains force as it goes along: Pill’s performance, at first amorphous, takes stronger shape, and Daniels’s chary blankness keeps you guessing about his guilt and contrition. The play’s many twists, and especially its final turn of the screw, raise provocative questions about where romance ends and abuse begins, and just how many crows it might take to make a murder. — Adam Feldman