It is to their beach house that a married couple named Danielle and Connor have come, intent on securing it against an oncoming storm, even as they are being buffeted from within by grief over the death of their 3-year-old son. The boy drowned in the ocean that is now roaring outside their door.
Danielle, who is played by Marianna Bassham, is wholly unreconciled to the loss of their child, and her heart isn’t in such chores as putting up storm shutters. “What’s the point of any of it?’’ she despairingly asks her husband. To Connor (Thomas Piper), the point is to try to begin to move on, one mundane detail at a time.
But Danielle sits on the beach, pouring out her hatred of the ocean, a onetime source of pleasure that she now sees as “a vast, never-ending grave site.’’ She thinks she hears something in the surging surf. Is that their son, crying out to her from the sea? (Sound designer David Remedios skillfully captures this haunting moment). “He’s still in the water,’’ Danielle tells Connor.
As she has previously demonstrated in such plays as Ronan Noone’s “Little Black Dress,’’ Bassham has a gift for portraying women who are in extremis, psychologically speaking . With every tremor in her pale face, every rise and fall of her voice — now fluty, now guttural — Bassham communicates the desperate anguish of a mother who won’t let go because she can’t let go. Piper capably traverses Connor’s emotional range, from relatively low-key in the first act to intense in the second.
The gulf between husband and wife widens rather than narrows when Connor tells Danielle that, in search of closure, he wrote their son a letter, telling him everything the father wanted to say, and threw the letter in the ocean, at the point where the boy was washed out to sea.
Warner, with a huge assist from Remedios and set designer Cristina Todesco, delivers a goosebump-raising scene to end the first act, as the wrathful sea rises up and the ferocious storm barrels into the beach house, apparently obliterating the house and the terrified couple alike.
