Someone at the London Telegraph called David Harrower’s “Blackbird”: “An extraordinary, no-holds-barred drama that both chills and thrills.” Well, chills maybe, given “Blackbird’s” subject matter: An older man and a young woman meet to discuss their illegal, illicit sexual liaison 15 years earlier.
But there are few thrills in the production of “Blackbird” at the Studio Theatre. Except for the very beginning of the play, which is linguistically intriguing (lots of staccato, single words as the characters react to one another as if having been thrown into frigid water) the play seems to be just an unwholesome version of the old, familiar boy-meets-girl story. Except here it’s man-who’s-old-enough-to-know-better meets young girl. The language goes flat and boring and so does the story.
