Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal are certainly the reason why “Sea Wall/A Life” has now moved uptown to the Hudson…
In the lobby of the Hudson, for $20 you can buy a quartet of magnets with lines from the show. The lines go beyond unmemorable – “But who wants to think of the future when the present is this monumental” — which is ironic, given the marketing: The two characters, says the show’s website, “take us on a journey you will never forget.”
That’s not the only irony. There may not in fact be any self-evidently memorable lines nor an undeniably unforgettable journey. But there don’t have to be. The strength of these monologues lies precisely in their modesty – in the modesty of the production, which is presented on a virtually bare stage (except for the very end); and in the performances, which are quiet, casual and nuanced; and in the characters, who each are humbled by their personal confrontations with both life and death.
And that’s what ties the two monologues together – the characters grappling with the minutia of both birth and death, but also the (yes) monumental implications of both.
Alex and Abe, one a photographer, the other a music producer, are both married men in their 30s, both at one point in their narratives new fathers, and each begins their stories with what sounds like insignificant chit-chat and ends by talking about tragedy.
It is easier to describe A Life, which is presented second, because Gyllenhaal’s character Abe lets us know quickly what life and death stories he will be telling us – his wife’s pregnancy and the eventual birth of his daughter, and the illness and death of his father. The anecdotes are funny or sad, but always specific, detailed – reading off of his cell phone the list of names he and his wife are deciding for the child; describing his father’s angioplasty and the problems with his getting a pacemaker. But as in Nick Payne’s 2015 play Constellations, which marked the playwright’s Broadway debut as well as that of Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson, A Life deliberately plays with time. The timeline of the journeys toward the birth and the death are conflated and confused. By the end, it’s not even clear in any given sentence which story Abe is talking to us about. If this sounds like a gimmick, somehow it works. The connections between the two major events become clearer, like a (modest) epiphany. “I don’t understand why we prepare so fucking wonderfully and elaborately for birth and yet so appallingly and haphazardly for death,” Abe says (not one of the quotes on the magnets.)
In Sea Wall, Sturridge as Alex introduces us to his father-in-law, whose name we never learn, and his wife Helen, and his daughter Lucy, and we learn how he met and got to know each. His father-in-law, a retired soldier, takes to him (as Helen predicted he would), and invites Alex to go Scuba diving with. He wants to visit the Sea Wall.
“I ask him ‘the what?’ He says ‘The Sea Wall.’ This makes no sense to me at all. There’s a wall in the sea? It drops down. Hundreds of feet. I had no idea that the bed of the sea was built like that. I thought it was a gradual slope. We swim out there and actually once you’re inside the water it’s kind of a magic ….” Although “the darkness of the fall that the wall in the sea reveals is as terrifying as anything I’ve seen.”
It’s a half hour into this 45-minute monologue that Alex tells us, strangely, “there’s a hole running through the center of my stomach” — and relates the tragedy to which, we realize, his seemingly aimless stories were leading. I won’t tell you what it is, but suddenly the Sea Wall becomes a clear and clever metaphor, and all the skeptical questions about God that he was challenging his father-in-law with seem to have some point.
There’s no straightforward wisdom here, no drama. “I’m holding my entire head together. The skin and the shell of me,” Alex says simply, but his conversation is mostly oblique; he talks about the random things he sees out the window, and what he overhears, and in playwright Simon Stephens’ modesty, his unwillingness to offer any lessons, we get a persuasive glimpse into grief.
Sea Wall/A Life are on stage at Hudson Theatre (141 W 44th St, between 6th and 7th Avenues, New York, NY 10036 through September 29, 2019.
originally published in DC Theater Scene
