At several points in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, the audience seems unsure if it should laugh. The play’s subject matter is transgressive; one character makes an offhand remark about possibly committing murder, while another confesses to an awful sexual encounter with her father. Both feel almost too shocking to take seriously—but should we, as a crowd, be laughing at violence and incest?
The play, by John Patrick Shanley (Doubt), is about two hurt and sensitive people, Danny and Roberta, who meet at a dive bar in the Bronx (Shanley is a native) and subsequently spend the night together, despite both their hesitations. Their dialogue teeters between affection and callousness, often in rapid succession, reflecting the characters’ chronic uncertainty and fear of intimacy. While the touchy, fragile Danny is constantly getting into fights (“I’m peaceful but people fuck with me,” he says), Roberta is a single mother haunted by her past and desperate for a storybook romance.
Shanley’s play is now 40 years old, and everything from the set’s functional jukebox and hazy string lights to the ubiquity of cigarettes recalls an earlier decade. Yet with Christopher Abbott and Aubrey Plaza as its stars, the piece does not feel dated. Abbott and Plaza are naturals in these roles—he, with his gentle demeanor but brooding underbelly; she, with her characteristic deadpan humor. (You would never know that this was Plaza’s theatrical debut—that haunting stare is only more penetrative from a stage—but perhaps her former roommate, Patti LuPone, gave her a few pointers.)
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is helmed by first-time director Jeff Ward, a close friend of Abbott’s, and under his guidance, the classic two-hander—which has become a staple audition piece for many acting students—veers off in compelling new directions. His most notable intervention? The addition of a pas de deux, choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, to link Acts I and II. (The often forgotten subtitle of the play is “An Apache Dance,” a reference to the highly charged, sometimes even rough, early 20th-century French dance style.)
The day after the play’s opening night, Vogue caught up with Abbott—who last appeared onstage in The Rose Tattoo, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, in 2016—to talk about his long relationship with the piece and its director, learning the dance, and the power of a live audience. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Vogue: In an interview that you did earlier this year, you emphasized the importance of not only entertaining the audience, but also you and Aubrey entertaining each other. What did you mean by that?
Christopher Abbott: Yeah, I mean, we’re the ones doing it every night, eight times a week. So I think there’s a level of—without going too outside the bounds—keeping it fresh for us and just checking in that we’re having fun on stage, and sort of staying engaged.
That makes sense. Prior to this play, I most recently saw you as Hal in Sanctuary. Much like Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, that movie portrays an intense dynamic between just two characters. Do you enjoy acting in these one-on-one contexts?
It’s more concentrated in that way. Micah Bloomberg, who wrote [Sanctuary], also writes plays. And, if I’m not mistaken, I think he even started writing Sanctuary as a play initially, and then at some point changed it over to a script. So there’s an element there that is sort of contained and theatrical. But it’s not like I exclusively look for one-on-one plays. It’s more of a coincidence. But I’ve loved Danny and the Deep Blue Sea since I was in school, and worked on it in scenes in school. It’s fun to just sort of play with one person. You can be very concentrated and develop a single chemistry with one character.
Over the course of your career, you’ve played several—shall I say—disturbed characters, from the arc of Charlie in Girls to your recent role in Sanctuary, as a hotel chain heir in a complicated relationship with a dominatrix. What drew you specifically to the role of Danny in this play?
I guess he’s a violent or angry character, but there’s a pretty strong layer of vulnerability with him, and his pain sort of comes from a very justified place, you know? And at the end of the day, the play is a love story—a bit of a fucked-up one, but still a love story nonetheless. The writing is just so truthful and honest.
Did you find yourself at all relating to Danny personally, or were you engaging in a practice to get into that character’s headspace?
I think it’s a marriage. It’s a marriage of both. I think for me, it sort of starts out as a character and an idea that’s very outside of you. And then as the process goes on, I think you start to bring in your own idiosyncrasies and all the things that make it personal to you. I feel like that’s sort of the process with a lot of things that I do—it starts like a very separate character, and then there’s a melding process that happens throughout rehearsal.
During many moments in the play, when absurd statements were made by the characters, particularly violent and sexual ones, people sort of stifled their laughs—like they weren’t sure if they were allowed to laugh. Obviously much of the content of the play is intense and intimate, but do you see this play as a comedy at all? Do you think we should be laughing?
It’s not up to me to judge or dictate what the audience laughs at or doesn’t laugh at. We’ve had previews that had a more laugh-y audience, and we’ve had ones that are more serious. It’s part of the fun game of doing theater, because the audience is always going to be the other character in the room. Our job is to just try to stick to the truth, and whether the truth is perceived as scary or funny, that’s up to the audience.
I read that you had a fight coordinator, Drew Leary. I think many people now are familiar with intimacy coordinators, but what was the role of the fight coordinator?
Yeah, the fight coordinator—he’s great and he basically helped us with a lot of the scene where Aubrey’s, like, slapping me, and there’s this scene with a choke. So he helped us do that as safely as possible. And again, our goal is to do all this stuff as truthfully as possible. You know, weirdly, there is actually not that much intimacy in the play; these are both characters that are afraid of love in a lot of ways. The sort of interpreted sex scene between Acts I and II is done through dance and choreography, and I think the choreography of the duet is a beautiful symbol. It’s symbolism, really, for intimacy in that way. And I think it’s the right approach.
I found that choreography to be one of the most captivating parts of the play. I read that Jeff Ward was granted permission to develop movement beyond what was initially scripted by playwright John Patrick Shanley. What was the motivation behind adding the dance scene?
Yeah, I mean in the play, there is no dance, you know? It’s something completely added in. Jeff, our director and a friend of mine—it was his idea. He wanted to do some sort of choreography in this play, especially for that transition. And then Mark Berger, one of our producers, had worked with Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, who are our choreographers. We all met, and the collaboration with them was probably my favorite part of the process, just because they’re so good at what they do. I can’t imagine this play now without that. And Jeff and I have been friends for a long time, and I know that he says that it was a little bit inspired because he knew I could dance.
Have you danced in other performances?
No, no. He’s talking about back in the day, like house parties or something like that.
What was it like to be directed by someone you know on such a personal level?
I’ve known him a long time, and Jeff and I have gone to see a lot of plays together. We would often have the same opinion and we’ve always sort of had the same goal or the same desire of what we’ve been craving to see in theater. So I knew, for what he lacked in maybe experience as a theater director, I think he more than makes up for in just his love for it and his taste.
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village until January 7, 2024.