Theater Review: Playwright LucasHnath experiments with the ghost story in his drama about a grieving young woman and a professional medium, 'The Thin Place'
, a fantasia involving Bill and Hillary Clinton — has produced one of his most daring works yet with this latest effort, involving the fateful relationship between a grieving young woman and a professional medium. Unfortunately,, receiving its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons, reveals the playwright to be working on thin ice.
The house lights stay on throughout the monologue, delivered in matter-of-fact fashion, and stay lit for a good portion of the play, as if to make the audience complicit in what's going on. The stage is bare, except for two comfortable chairs, and the back of the theater is exposed. There's no artifice going on here, the playwright seems to be saying, although it soon becomes evident that the main character is an unreliable narrator.
Hilda's comfort proves short-lived, however, as Linda soon reveals that she really has no psychic powers and instead relies on calculated guesswork to achieve her effects. "It's really not all that different from that so-called psychotherapy, except what I do actually works," she says cheekily. Instead, it turns out that it may actually be Hilda who has the ability to access the "thin place" separating the living from the dead.
On one level, the play can be taken as a standard theatrical suspenser featuring chilling, if low-rent, theatrical effects, and some presentational meta-theatricality including, at one point, a mind-reading trick involving a supposed audience member.
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