Horrors of Dependency Weigh Heavily in New York Debut of ‘Blackout Songs’

It’s seldom a good sign when you leave a show admiring a performer’s bone structure more than any other aspect of the production.That’s in no way a slight to Abbey Lee, the astonishingly beautiful and very capable actress who plays one of two characters in the national premiere of “Blackout Songs,” Joe White’s one-act portrait of a pair of codependent alcoholics. Ms. Lee, an Australian model who has appeared in various sci-fi and action films, is cast as a woman identified in the script as Her, whom we first encounter sitting outside what seems to be an AA meeting.Owen Teague, a television and film actor who starred in 2024’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” plays Him, an art student who sidles up beside Her, shaking and stammering and wearing a neck brace. Clearly, it’s the beginning of a beautiful love story — that is, if you enjoy watching attractive people torture themselves and each other unremittingly for 90 minutes.“Blackout” arrives in New York following two sold-out runs in London, where it earned critical praise and an Olivier Award nomination. This new staging is helmed by Rory McGregor, a British director now based here, whose recent credits include “Tender Napalm,” another U.K. import in which an initially unnamed young man and woman interacted with an overwrought intensity that could blur the line between agony and ecstasy.But where “Napalm” had a fantastical vibe, with references to aliens and sea nymphs and armies of monkeys, “Blackout” finds melodrama in the most quotidian spaces and situations. We follow Her and Him to various settings suggested by Scott Pask’s spare, bleak scenic design: a coffee table for the meeting, a simple cross for a church.Abbey Lee and Owen Teague in ‘Blackout Songs.’ Photo by Emillio MadridIntimations of violent and self-destructive behavior start early. In addition to the neck brace, there’s a missing tooth, and mention of a man watching Her “like a dog he’s tied outside the butchers.” Before long, blood (fake, I trust) is splattered on the stage — ostensibly from the tooth, though there are different suggestions about when, how, and why Him loses it.Not surprisingly, you see, both Him and Her are rather unreliable narrators, so we hear conflicting narratives as their relationship proceeds — or spirals, more accurately. Mr. White’s tense vignettes, under Mr. McGregor’s breathless guidance, allow them limited time to bond with and torment one another before they’re interrupted by strobe lights and loud bursts of sound, respectively provided by Stacey Derosier and Brian Hickey. During these breaks, both actors flail about, simulating pleasure and pain. It’s as if the playwright and/or director felt it necessary to reinforce their characters’ instability, and the deep, dark passions that keep drawing them back together, and to other chemicals that may be killing them.The result is more irritating than cathartic. At a recent preview, I couldn’t shake the feeling I was watching horrors that will surely seem all too familiar for some audience members being romanticized in the form of a good-looking bohemian couple — Her writes poetry, we learn — whose massive consumption of debilitating toxins doesn’t prevent them from having really hot sex, at least periodically.Both actors are nonetheless credible and compelling, though Ms. Lee’s overzealous cockney accent makes it hard to decipher a word here and there. Mr. White saddles them with some obvious metaphors; there are references to rivers, representing booze, and to “the great dry desert” of sobriety. There’s also a lot of talk about the need for people to carry each other, though to the playwright’s credit, “Blackout Songs” doesn’t absolve its characters of self-responsibility. “Did you drop me, somewhere along the line?” Her asks Him at one point. The problem, of course, is that he didn’t, and doesn’t; if nothing else, this play makes the consequences of that decision excruciatingly vivid.

Horrors of Dependency Weigh Heavily in New York Debut of ‘Blackout Songs’

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