Review: Whose Voice Is It In The Disturbing ‘Dana H.’ Anyway?

And yours: While mimicking Higginbotham’s mental dissociation, the eerieness of lip sync also destabilizes most notions of normalcy in the world. Just as Higginbotham’s voice seems to gush out of O’Connell’s body in the process of possessing it, it suggests a comfortable, parallel lower life to the familiar, which at every moment threatens to break through a rather thin barrier of routine.

It’s clear that the audio issue is at the center of Hnath’s concern here, since Higginbotham—it’s not a spoiler to say that—is his mother. At the time of the abduction, she was a freshman at New York University and apparently didn’t know anything about what was going on in Florida. He didn’t want her to know: Jim kept his son’s safety over his head to enforce compliance. “Everything I did was based on things for Lucas, you know?”

In the silence that follows this line, you can almost hear the mother’s endless chasing complaint: “But what has it done for me?”

While it’s true to say he honors his story, it’s the most parsimonious way possible to look at the success of “Dana H”. When the game is running Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater in 2020After productions in Los Angeles and Chicago, I was thrilled that O’Connell transformed himself into some kind of musical instrument and let Higginbotham’s recording “play” him. With his own voice muted, he emphasized the other tools at his disposal, so that even the smallest changes in posture and expression became extremely meaningful.

These influences became more complex in the Broadway production and shifted their weight in the process. More often now O’Connell seems to be working against the apparent accuracy of the text: he mimics Higginbotham’s grotesque laugh a little more vividly, highlighting moments when he doubts his memory. Although I had never questioned any aspect of the story before, I now find myself wondering if such a traumatized woman is a reliable narrator and whether a play is “real” just because it has words.

Hnath takes pains to point out that this is happening, in part by revealing his technique at every opportunity. We see that O’Connell puts on his headphones at the beginning of the game and takes them off at the end. Beeps indicate the points where the transcript was edited. (Sound design and grisly music is by Mikhail Fiksel.) The interview was conducted by Civilians art director Steve Cosson, not Hnath, because he explained to The Times, asked her mother to tell the story “to someone who knows nothing”. That way, there would be no shortcuts that could cause suspicion.