Archives for April 17, 2007

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer Prize for drama yesterday. Here’s part of what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal last year:
“It’s a family drama with punch lines, a genre that at best runs to glibness, and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire sweetens the loaf of his characters’ suffering with a double spoonful of sugar. Not that their plight is less than deadly serious. Becca and Howie are a nice suburban couple whose son was killed when he darted in front of a car. Izzy, Becca’s kid sister, is a spunky ne’er-do-well who suddenly finds herself pregnant without benefit of clergy. Nat, their mother, is no stranger to sorrow: her third child, a heroin addict, hung himself. All this might have been the stuff of domestic tragedy, but Rabbit Hole fails to scratch the surface of Becca’s decorous middle-class grief. Instead, we spend too much time chortling at Izzy’s haplessness and Nat’s tactlessness–and we’re never surprised by anything anyone says or does.
“Such are the comfortable, comforting ways of post-Oprah TV drama, and the familiar presence of Cynthia Nixon and Tyne Daly in the cast serves still further to make Rabbit Hole the kind of show you can see any day of the week in your very own living room….”
Go figure.
UPDATE: For the scoop on how Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer, go here.

“The use of the guillotine becomes an addiction.”
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism