The cast of “The Thin Place,” now playing at The Hill Arts, l to r, Courtney Cook (Sylvia), Maureen Butler (Linda), Phoebe Parker (Hilda) and Michael Grew (Jerry). Doroga Media
You never know what might be found in that space “just behind and just a little above your eyes” where mysterious messages sometimes arrive.
The murky world of psychic communication is always nearby in “The Thin Place,” a play that, at its best, takes you into dark, unsettling, but maybe also consoling, locales of the mind.
Playwright Lucas Hnath’s 2019 work concerns paranormal messaging of an ultimately indefinable sort. It can both scare and liberate those who are able to recognize where the barriers between worlds, here and beyond, are thin and penetrable.
Co-directed by Tess Van Horn and Lauren Stockless, this first production of the second season of the Portland Theater Festival, now relocated to The Hill Arts (formerly known as St. Lawrence Arts) in Portland, has some pacing issues but offers enough intrigue, comic relief and bits of spooky theatricality to engage those who sign on for the “roller coaster ride,” as the author has described this play.
The play centers around Hilda (Phoebe Parker), who narrates directly to the audience at times. She’s a bit of a lost soul who has unresolved memories of her grandmother and mother and their conflicting ideas about life and what’s beyond.
Hilda befriends (and maybe more) Linda (Maureen Butler), an older immigrant from England who makes a living by convincing people that their inner conflicts can sometimes be resolved by contacting spirits from beyond. Linda admits to a sort of therapeutic chicanery at one point. But Hilda holds on to a belief that there’s something more to Linda’s skill, since her grandmother had once told her similar things in one of her “demonic” moments, as Hilda’s mother described them.
Phoebe Parker, as Hilda, in “The Thin Place.” The production is part of the Portland Theater Festival. Doroga Media
Parker added credible emotion, if not quite enough energy, to her lengthy monologues during the roughly 80-minute-without-intermission show. Was it the writing or the acting that made one uncomfortably think “get-to-the-point” while a character is slowly dragging a difficult memory out of herself? Probably both here.
Butler’s British working-class accent and four-letter-word-laced descriptions added color and laughs while a certain sinister undertone to her character developed. The local theater veteran, due to some recent health issues, occasionally referred to a script in her lap. But her clear grasp of the character made this a minor distraction.
Is she as manipulative as guest and mentor Sylvia (Courtney Cook, in a standout performance) asserts forcefully before succumbing again to Linda’s charms?
Michael Grew, as Linda’s cousin Jerry, rounds out the cast. His character’s wandering hands toward Hilda seemed to represent a reach toward something organic amid all the otherworldly handwringing of the others. Some of his conversations with Linda about the exploitation of fear by politicians hit very much closer to the here and now.
The minimal set, sound and lighting designs give way to something a little more overtly haunting in the later minutes, when it becomes clear that things can both come and go unexpectedly through that thin place.
Steve Feeney is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.
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