By SHARON EBERSON
In Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, the collision of two damaged, headstrong people ignites white-hot sparks that neither could have anticipated. With each passing moment, her overt flirtatiousness and his overbearing hostility build toward a feverish crescendo.
As Roberta and Danny, Shannon Donovan and Michael Patrick Trimm provide enough sustained, electrifying performances and raw passion provide enough energy to light the Cathedral of Learning, from basement to tower and back, where the John Patrick Shanley drama is currently in residence.
They bare all, and not just a lot of skin, as loners burdened with unbearable baggage. She lugs around personal baggage that includes living with parents she detests, as the single mother of a preteen whom she refers to as “the kid,” and claims he was born a bad seed.
Roberta has come to a Bronx dive bar to escape the crowd in her home and inside her head, and finds the only other person there is Danny, drinking a pitcher of beer on his own, and wearing the dark bruises of a fight.
Danny’s got anger management issues that he lets out as often as has them under control — his trucker colleagues call him “The Beast.”
Trimm is menacing, his fists clenched and ready to lash out, just as readily as mean tongue.
As love-starved Roberta, Donovan is a relentlessly cajoling seductress, carving cracks in Danny’s wall of anger and self-destructive behavior.
Each has a confession that would frighten most other people, yet these two recognize each other’s pain, creating an opening for compassion and perhaps something more.
Shanley weaves tension and release, over and over, into a taut script. He won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for one of my favorite movies, Moonstruck (moonlight, or something like it, plays a role here, too), another story of love in New York, but as tame as a lamb by comparison. Kelly Trumbull’s direction takes no prisoners in the emotional and physical battering each character visits on the other. Pittsburgh-native Donovan, who has been based in Chicago, is listed as “fight choreographer,” with Ricardo Vila-Roger as intimacy coordinator, and both deserve recognition for violence that is jarringly realistic, and sexual entanglements that pass for romance between two people unaccustomed to a compassionate touch.
The set by Alex Keplar, in the Rauh Studio black box, includes a dramatic curtain drop, revealing a bedroom atop a platform. With no safety net below, the uninhibited edges served as visceral reminders of two people teetering on the edge — on one side, despair; on the other, a lifeline to hope.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is co-produced by Trimm, and follows his triumphant solo show as The Smuggler, for Pittsburgh International Classic Theatre.
I saw the 75-minute play in the afternoon of a two-show day, and I left exhausted on behalf of Donovan and Trimm, knowing they would have to repeat the demanding roles that night. Their sensual, searing performances are not to be missed.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea continues at the Rauh Studio Theater, Cathedral of Learning, Basement, 4200 Fifth Ave., Oakland, July 12 and July 16-19, 2026. Tickets: https://dannyandthedeepbluesea.ludus.com/show_page.php?show_id=200536099
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Our Posts, Reviews
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