‘Dana H.’ Star Deirdre O’Connell Haunted Broadway In A Voice That Came From The Real World – Deadline Tony Watch Q&A

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The word that seems to crop up most often in descriptions of both Dana H., the play written by Lucas Hnath, and Dana H., the characterization by Deirdre O’Connell, is “harrowing,” – few reviewers could resist, for the simple reason that no other word seems to come close to capturing the real-life experience that the work chronicled and the effect the telling had on audiences.Dana H., which ran on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre last fall and is nominated for three Tony Awards (for Les Waters’ direction, Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design and O’Connell’s performance), tells the unlikely but all too true story of Dana Higginbotham, the mother of the playwright, a chaplain in a Florida psychiatric hospital who, in 1997, was abducted by a violent psychopath who’d been under her care.

Terrorized, gaslighted, threatened and subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse, the abduction lasted for five months, from one motel to another, in the dark of night and broad daylight, hotel clerks and police officers repeatedly turning blind eyes.As if demanding that the universe finally pay heed to her story, Dana H.

is told not only told in the words of the woman who lived it, but in her voice: O’Connell, in one of the most mesmerizing performances of the year, lip-synced to recorded interviews of Higginbotham.

The effect was an unforgettable portrait of trauma and survival, at once nightmarish and weirdly commonplace.O’Connell is a familiar and acclaimed presence on the New York stage (currently appearing in Will Arbery’s Corsicana, directed by Sam Gold at Playwrights Horizons) and known to TV and film audiences for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York, Law & Order and, indelibly, her performance as the