Photos by Liz Lauren. Top, center: Mattie Hawkinson and Bill Petersen, Bottom: Petersen and director Dennis Zacek (foreground.)
With the spare, riveting Blackbird, David Harrower does the near impossible: Tells a story that has you empathizing with a pedophile. Without ever diminishing the all-but unspeakably heinous gravity of the crime, Harrower humanizes the criminal, creating an anti-hero who has who is as loveable as he is horrible. You’ll ache for this man, while at the same time shuddering in fury.
People may flock to Blackbird on the strength of the marquee – CSI’s Bill Petersen stars. But they’ll leave shaken to the core by a character who bears no resemblance to Gil Grissom and a production directed to searing perfection by Dennis Zacek for the Victory Gardens Theater. There’s no doubt about guilt, or about the heinous nature of the crime at the broken heart of the story. This isn’t about a 20-year-old caught making out with a high school junior. It is about a 40-year-old man having sex multiple times over many months with a 12-year-old girl, the daughter of a friend.
When Blackbird opens, Ray (Petersen) is in his mid-50s, He has served years in prison for the crime, changed his name, and remade himself as a management cog in a dreary, nondescript supply company. When Una (Mattie Hawkinson, riveting as a survivor badly, indelibly scarred) shows up unexpectedly in the company’s filthy basement lunchroom (authentic down to the last Styrofoam container and overflowing trash can thanks to set designer Dean Taucher) , it’s as if the walls have started closing in. The oppressive weight of rage, irretrievable loss and irreparable injury becomes as palpable as the sticky candy wrappers underfoot and the barely audible hum of the Coke machine. 
Much of the piece’s complexity lies in the sheer ordinariness of Petersen’s Ray. He isn’t some evil exotic or larger-than-life villain . He’s the working-class schlub you’d buy a beer for at the neighborhood pub, the neighbor who helps you dig your car out of the snow, far more Willy Loman than Hannibal Lecter. And there’s no equivocating the monstrosity of what he’s done.
Yet it’s not the descriptions of oral sex on a 12-year-old body or groping barely pubescent breasts in a public park that horrify the most. It’s the aftermath of these events.
“You left me alone. Bleeding. You left me. You left me in love,” Una says. It was a life sentence, making Ray’s six in prison (“Blackbird” is British slang for an ex-convict) years seem like a slap on the wrist. But as it turns out, and as Petersen makes so gut-wrenchingly vivid, Ray’s been living out his own life sentence. At least, that’s how it seems. The moral ambiguity of the piece is both brilliant and shattering. Can unforgivable crimes be committed with integrity, and even love?
Then there’s this wholly disquieting truth, disgorged as Ray and Una resurrect their devastating past:
“Adults lie. They don’t even know they’re doing it.”
It’s a sentence of bone-truth, and one that throws everything we’ve learned about Ray into question.
Harrower then ups the stakes further still. In the final moments of the production, he brings in a third character whose entrance elicited an audible, justifiable shock from the opening night audience.
Just before that final, hellishly ambiguous revelation, Harrower creates a prolonged, scene that is almost unbearably awful. Not awful in the sense that the play is lacking in any means – quite the polar opposite. It is a scene so excruciatingly tense the very atmosphere seems about to snap into a thousand razor-edged shards.
Surely the bogey man – the terror that has been quietly, unmistakably accruing for so long – is about to engulf these characters we’ve come to care so deeply for, and destroy them like a wolf ripping the heart from a lamb. It’s the stuff of panic attacks and sudden suffocation. It is also illustrative of the unnerving, tragic power of Blackbird.
Blackbird continues through Aug. 16 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets are $30 - $58. For more information, call 773/871-3000, click here or go to www.victorygardens.org.
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