“Dana H” makes us voyeurs on the road from hell

We’re peering into a dingy, shoebox-like hotel room. Faded paint, nondescript furniture and bedding, curtain-covered exterior window, and overhead fan are bathed in antiseptic fluorescent light. It’s like someone split open this sad, seedy locale to display it for us. 

Jordan Baker, as the titular Dana H, takes her seat in the middle of the hotel room, and gets set up with earphones. An over-bright spotlight pins her, and she begins answering questions and offering insights that range from quizzical and anguished to resolute and deeply spiritual. It’s like watching an interviewer split open her psyche.  

Bathed in that spotlight’s hard glow, Dana H is a deeply harrowing and profoundly human tale. Lucas Hnath’s play debuted in New York in 2019, earning praise for its raw intensity and innovative storytelling, and winning numerous accolades, including the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show and two Tony Awards (Best Performance, Best Sound Design). Crow’s Theatre, in collaboration with Goodman Theatre, Center Theatre Group, and Vineyard Theatre, has mounted in its Canadian premiere a piece that is as thought-provoking as it is unnerving. 

Adapted from the real-life trauma of Hnath’s mother Dana Higginbotham’s abduction, the play centres Jordan Baker in an unusual and unsettling performance. Higginbotham was a chaplain taken captive by a psychiatric patient and confined to a nightmarish series of motel rooms for a period of five months. This story is the backbone of the interview-based narrative – which explains the hotel room setting. But the manner of the telling sets Dana H apart. Baker’s delivery is a precise lip-sync to selections from an extended series of original recorded interviews with Higginbotham.  

As an audience, watching and listening to Dana’s real voice creates both an eerie immediacy and a complex connection. We become wide-eyed, wide-eared voyeurs lapping up the details of a journey into hell where the whole world seems to have acted as the devil’s accomplice. At the same time, the experience makes us deeply empathetic. The ellipses-like beeps between each separate interview snippet are like fast-forward buttons giving us a sense of the sheer volume of interviews, which ran over days, and therefore the amount of soul-crushing detail and soul-baring emotion we are not privy to.

Directed by Les Waters, with a scenic design by Andrew Boyce and haunting soundscapes by Mikhail Fiksel, the play’s aesthetic magnifies its thematic darkness and ratchets up the stakes. That shoebox stage space becomes a true canvas for Higginbotham’s psyche. Light and shadow dance in the tight confines of what is less a literal space than an amalgam of the prisons –  her own and others’ – which she explores in her answers. This creative choice underscores the play’s exploration of the complex interplay between captor and captive, and involuntary actions and conscious choices – where power dynamics shift, the lines of morality blur, and agency is a complex dance between what you are given and what you find within.  

Baker’s tour de force performance is more than acting: it’s an act of summoning. Channelling Higginbotham’s resilience, despair, and eventual liberation, Baker becomes the medium through which Dana’s story is told, and a vessel for a voice that her son refused to allow to be erased and silenced. The unique method of storytelling – within this psychic stage space – amplifies the narrative’s impact, making Dana H. a powerful testament to the strength found in vulnerability. 

This is a powerful play about confronting, surmounting and letting go of trauma and entanglement. Dana Higginbotham has searing memories and deep, incredibly hard-won insights and skills to share. Through the intimacy of Dana H, we have the rare privilege to experience how she worked through her confinement in order to name and make use of those talents, so she could free herself and free others, and maybe – just maybe – help us free ourselves.   

The Crow’s Theatre Presentation of Dana H runs at Factory Theatre until April 7, 2024. Click here to reserve tickets.

© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2024