By Marty Hughley
The Oregonian
September 5, 2008

Several years ago a precocious pop star had a hit with a song that proudly asserted that "age ain't nothin' but a number."

Perhaps so. But consider these numbers: 12 and 40.

Now do the math for those two numbers together in the complicated equation of a sexual relationship.

Simple answer: Ick.

For a more complete answer, you could start with David Harrower's "Blackbird," last season's Laurence Olivier Award-winner for best new play in London and the opening production of Artists Repertory Theatre's 2008-09 season.

This unsettling drama, which a reviewer for the Web site CurtainUp called a "harrowing pas de deux of bitterness, shame, regret and passion," takes place 15 years after the disturbing fact. Ray has done his jail time, moved to another city and rebuilt his life under a new name. But Una has found him through the most mundane of clues: a photo in a trade magazine she saw in a doctor's office.

It is victim confronting abuser -- rapist -- legally and morally speaking. But as the play unfolds, the nuances and complications multiply, through questions of intent, need, suffering, justice, love and so on.

To director JoAnn Johnson, Ray's guilt isn't the issue, despite the varieties of mitigating light that might be shed.

"I think at the foundation of it there is a set opinion," Johnson says. "In a legal determination, he is a criminal. So that question doesn't seem that interesting to me. What's interesting is in the areas between the boundaries that separate these two people -- to what degree is there love, to what degree is there manipulation, is there abuse."

How to inhabit and explore the gray areas in such an emotionally charged subject is tricky, and Johnson says what interested her most about the script was the way Harrower used language in a fragmentary, clashing way she likens to contemporary poetry and that she says the playwright himself likened to jazz.

That may be a clue to the heart of the play. Jazz is a language not so much of confrontation but of negotiation, the accommodation of individual interpretations within a single story. Ray and Una share a past that cannot be resolved by the simple means of confrontation.

"They've both been through something that has had such a huge effect on who they are, they really can't exist without each other," Johnson says. "They're compelled to re-examine and negotiate their situation, to find out where the agreement is."

Harrower avoids drawing simplistic distinctions between the characters or leaving the power dynamics between them predictable. Though there are some extended monologues, much of it proceeds by a process of interrogation, with questions and answers flashing back between Ray and Una, leaving questions about the precise truths of their past.

"It's strange in that way; very full of ambiguity," Johnson says. "I think every single person who sees it will have their own sense of what's really happened."

While not trying to defend Ray's crime, the play does suggest that the two shared an emotional connection that was important to them both, and that might even remain. Ray is neither a monster nor a sad old schlub -- at least merely or completely. Similarly, Una can't be just a damaged victim, an avenging angel or a sneaky seducer.

"I was concerned that there was enough balance in the play not to paint Ray into a corner from the get-go," Johnson said, explaining why she cast Allen Nause and Amaya Villazan not just for their emotional range and flexibility but for a kind of innate likability.

What's important is seeing these two, however flawed, as fully human, rather than defined solely by their indiscretion and/or crime. And as humans entwined in each other's lives, Ray and Una face questions that neither age nor statute can settle.

"It can seem so foreign and so distasteful," Johnson says of the play. "And yet at the same time, it can be so very familiar."