By Richard Wattenberg
The Oregonian
September 8, 2008

As the lights come up we see Ray, a man in his mid-50s, confronting Una, a young woman in her 20s. Caught in an awkward moment of unspeakable intensity, they face each other across a room littered with garbage. Fast food containers, candy wrappers, plastic drink bottles, cookie and potato-chip bags cover the floor and tables of what looks like the break room of a medium-sized business establishment.

This initial tableau sets the tone for Artists Repertory Theatre's 2008-09 season opener, a mostly riveting, thought-provoking production of British playwright David Harrower's troubling 2005 drama "Blackbird."

There is nothing tidy or ordered about the view of humanity this play offers. On the contrary, Harrower challenges the all-too-simple line we often draw between right and wrong.

"Blackbird" takes on an issue that prompts moral outrage. Some fifteen years ago when Una was 12, she and Ray had sexual relations, and now after not having seen each other since that time, Una suddenly appears, seeking Ray out at his workplace. That the then-40-year-old Ray had sex with the child Una is abhorrent, but as these two explore each others' memories and the passions and pains that motivated their past actions, a story that defies clear-cut moral categories unfolds.

The questions start to pile up. Is Ray a sexual predator? Did he use Una and leave her just as his work associates have tossed away empty junk food containers? Or did he see something in her that others failed to see? Was he really in love with the pre-adolescent girl? Did he really want to take care of and protect her?

Was Una a not-so-naive Lolita or just a lonely young girl who wanted to be taken more seriously than her age would allow?

And if Ray is a sexual predator, will he strike again? What can or will Una do about this possibility? He was found guilty of abusing a minor, and he has done jail time, but is this the whole story? How well does the law address the enigmatic mysteries of human desire?

Questions and more questions -- this is what Harrower offers us as he takes us deeper into the events that bind Ray and Una in a tortured dance, a dance vividly performed by Allen Nause and Amaya Villazan. Although the long one-act play does seem to slow down midway, it picks up toward the end, moving to a climax in which fiery violence and heated love are intertwined, only to be punctuated by an unexpected last-minute development.

Director JoAnn Johnson skillfully choreographs the two actors as they bob and weave, clinch and feint. Both Nause and Villazan skillfully negotiate Harrower's dialogue which, with its broken, incomplete sentences and rough transitions, sounds natural even as it gives poetic form to the fractured tentativeness of the two characters.

Nause brings passion to Ray's faltering efforts to protect his new post-prison identity, to fend off the perceived threat posed by Una. The desperate urgency driving him is most apparent when he pleadingly tries to persuade Villazan's Una that the textbook predator label does not fit him. In his defensiveness, Nause's Ray may never show real tenderness toward Una, but it is clear that his desire for her and for the girl she was still smolders within.

Una stands tall; she holds her own in the confrontation with this man who has had such a hold on her life. She taunts and attacks, but even as she tries to hide her vulnerability, it slips out. Moving fluently from bitter rebukes to wide-eyed terror to hysteria to resignation, Villazan demonstrates the broad range the character demands.

Ray's white-coated work associates, who appear as specter-like figures behind the up-stage heavily frosted glass windows that separate this break room from an unseen corridor, add an intriguing touch to the production. In the futile efforts of these unknown figures to peer through the semi-opaque windows we can see ourselves as we try to penetrate the inscrutable reality that is presented here.

"Blackbird" is what theater does best: It might not offer pat solutions, but it reveals life and its ambiguities.