Adam Rapp is one dark dude. His list of accomplishments is a mile long—among the highlights are the Herbert & Patricia Brodkin Scholarship; two Lincoln Center le Compte du Nouy Awards; a fellowship to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays; and the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights—there’s something to his dark storytelling that begets black pearls of truth.

At the onset of “Blackbird,” recently at The Players’ Ring and now heading to the Actor’s Workshop in Boston, we meet Baylis (Rob Scullin) on Christmas Eve. He’s filthy, he’s unkempt and he’s sitting in what must be the tiniest, seediest apartment in all of New York City. Sitting is about all Baylis can do, as he’s got a herniated disc and can’t move without searing pain. His only income is a pittance from Uncle Sam for his services in the Gulf; another present from the war was a disease that cost him control of his bowels.

Then Froggy (Tana Sirois) comes out of hiding in the bathroom. A rail-thin adolescent heroin addict, twitching between fixes, who just got diagnosed with hepatitis, Froggy is pregnant with a baby that’s not a product of the sterile Baylis.

Who’d imagine that we could be utterly fascinated by a two-hour conversation between these two? Their language is clipped, their grammar is bad, and it takes a while to begin to follow their street slang (you’ll learn the difference between a square and a bump when you attend the show). There’s also a pretty big hole in the text—one minute, Baylis is insisting Froggy go home to her well-to-do parents, as they have the means to help her; the next, he’s telling her she doesn’t have to, even though the alternative is certain death wrapped in a blanket on his filthy floor. If there’s something scarier waiting for Froggy at home, the text bypassed it, and if we’re to understand why she chooses to stay, and why Baylis chooses to let her, we’ve got to know what that is.

But you won’t stop observing, nonetheless.

Rob Scullin fully becomes this sloth of a man. The world has relegated him to scumbag status, and while he lives there most of the time, he still has his heroic moments and lines he won’t cross. Unfortunately, Scullin is also very uncomfortable during scenes that involve touching the much younger Sirois even remotely sexually; this discomfort brings us out of the moment. Sirois, for her part, is thoroughly convincing as the grubbily ethereal Froggy; she didn’t mind Baylis’ hands on her in the least, even offering a striptease up to him before her sick liver makes her collapse. But there isn’t much arc for her character. She remains at the end very much who she was at the beginning. Perhaps that’s the point.

Director Todd Hunter could not have painted a more tragic picture with the stark settings that he chose. He very plainly shows us that if these two people, living little better than animals in conditions most of us can’t imagine walking through, let alone living in, can still manage to find love, comfort and companionship in their hard cold world, well, that’s a damn beautiful thing. 


Blackbird
continues at the Actor’s Workshop, 327 Summer St.,, Boston,
Nov. 17-20. Shows are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. For tickets, call 603-828-8078.