Demon rabbits, sacrifice, and the end of the world
ART brings 'Donnie Darko' to the stage
CAMBRIDGE — In a church basement in Harvard Square, actors in street clothes sit at a long table. Production staffers tap at their laptops. The director makes a few announcements. They could be rehearsing Shakespeare or Arthur Miller, for all you can tell by looking at them.
Well, except for the guy wearing a demonic rabbit head with terrifying choppers.
Cult film fans will immediately recognize that a production of ‘‘Donnie Darko’’ is afoot. The American Repertory Theatre is bringing the dark flick to the stage, as adapted and directed by ART associate director Marcus Stern. The 23-year-old New York actor Dan McCabe has the title part, which Jake Gyllenhaal played in the 2001 movie written and directed by Richard Kelly.
A jet engine falls on teenage outcast Donnie’s bedroom while he’s outside talking to Frank, an evil-looking, man-size bunny who may or may not actually exist. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end x in 28 days, 6 hours, 14 minutes, and 12 seconds. Donnie spends the rest of the film trying to save the world while confronting what are either his own psychotic hallucinations or the very real manifestations of a break in the space-time continuum.
We’re a long way from James Stewart and ‘‘Harvey.’’
‘‘I have a specific version of the story in mind that is guiding me,’’ said Stern, ‘‘and that is a young man who’s really troubled and kind of tortured inside and doesn’t know why, and doesn’t understand these hallucinations he’s having with a giant rabbit everywhere, and is confused by his own destructive tendencies — flooding his school and burning down a house.
‘‘And the story is, this guy who is lost, it turns out he is only lost because he’s a chosen one, and the rabbit is offering him an opportunity to make the ultimate sacrifice, to reverse time and save those that he loves — his mom, his sister, and his girlfriend — by sacrificing his own life. In a way, he finally gains clarity by the very end because he finally understands his purpose in life,’’ Stern said.
For side issues, we get a high-school censorship controversy, a motivational speaker with a thing for kiddie porn, an old woman nicknamed Grandma Death, and of course, a full-on performance to a Duran Duran song by the tweener dance troupe Sparkle Motion, starring Donnie’s little sister. All the while, a timer is counting down to the end of the world.
‘‘I love not having a comfort zone,’’ ART acting artistic director Gideon Lester said with a laugh.
This production was his idea, and he acknowledged the overall aging of the audience was one reason. ‘‘We have an obligation to develop younger audiences, not just for the health of the performing arts, though, but for the health of our population,’’ Lester said. ‘‘It would be criminal if we allowed the performing arts to die as the audience got older, so we have to regenerate. We also have to regenerate by working with younger writers and artists and performers. That’s something we’re really focusing on at the ART.’’
Enter ‘‘Donnie Darko.’’
‘‘When I was putting the current season together, I really wanted to include a production that would continue the energy of Marcus’s collaboration with the Dresden Dolls last year on ‘The Onion Cellar,’ which brought an amazing, young, energetic audience to [the ART’s second stage] Zero Arrow,’’ Lester said.
His thoughts went to the low-budget ‘‘Donnie Darko’’ that Stern and students of the ART’s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training put on in 2004, after Stern ran across the movie by chance on TV. ‘‘It became a huge underground hit, underground in that we didn’t advertise it but word of mouth just spread like wildfire. And so it really seemed to be a perfect fit,’’ Lester said.
Some directors might have looked at the movie’s over-the-top weirdness and thought, uh, no way. Not Stern, who looks like an edgy theater director straight from central casting — balding, stubbled, wearing an old army jacket and a focused expression. He insists Kelly’s tale presents ‘‘a wonderful challenge.’’
‘‘In some sense I find doing realism and naturalism more difficult, because it is harder to be true. You’re always going to be false, inherently,’’ he said. ‘‘The more surreal or fractional a story is, the more elbow room you have as director and probably as an actor, too, to play around and shift gears really fast.’’
With 19 actors playing 24 roles in, at last count, 73 scenes in Stern’s cinematic script, that’s a lot of gear-shifting.
The slight-looking McCabe said he’s played ‘‘a lot of outsiders, semi-disturbed kids’’ like Donnie, but ‘‘I’ve never done anything like this. Everything I’ve ever done has been like, straightforward narrative with long scenes, at least 10- to 20-page scenes, and the longest scene in this is, like, two pages. It’s difficult but also rare. This happens, and then boom! I’ve got to run over to the other side of the stage with a quick light cue for the next scene.’’
Digging into the meaning of the story is more complicated. McCabe saw the movie when it came out, but has avoided re-watching Gyllenhaal’s performance now. From reading the script, he thinks Donnie ultimately may be on a search for God.
‘‘He has this one great line where he says, ‘I don’t want to be alone,’ when he’s talking to his therapist,’’ McCabe said. ‘‘And you could talk about, does he mean literally, ‘I don’t want to be alone when I die,’ or ‘I don’t want to be alone in the universe?’ ..... I mean, he is kind of a martyr, this character, he does sacrifice himself to put things back in order.’’
Despite all the parallel-time weirdness and sci-fi trappings, the story does have a deep emotional core, Stern said. But if the rabbit is offering Donnie such a momentous opportunity, why does it look so scary?
‘‘I don’t know for sure,’’ Stern said, ‘‘but my first thought is that things that are new and will take us in new directions are often very scary and very frightening, because they’re asking us to alter a path that has felt very comfortable and safe.
‘‘Maybe a nice part of the story we can take away,’’ he added, ‘‘is maybe not to run away from every frightening feeling that is asking us to diverge from our regular path.’’ 