Rabbit hole analysis PDF

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Professor Chelsea Hickman...

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Shill 1 Hannah Shill Script and Text Analysis 1 Professor Hickman Due: 4/29/2020 Response #5 Death is never easy to talk about. Death of a loved one is even harder to discuss. The death of one’s child is especially difficult. Most parents do not want to outlive their children. The loss of a person so young and so precious to someone is devastating and incredibly hard to cope with. David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole d oes an excellent, beautiful, and very real job of displaying different ways parents handle this tragedy and how they interact with those close to them as well showing how they evolve in their dialogue. Act 1 Scene 4 is the conclusion of act 1 and brings a plethora of emotion between the characters Becca and Howie. Becca has accidentally recorded over the tape of their deceased son Danny that Howie would watch to bring him some comfort. An argument about how each parent is grieving and the frustrations they face with the other commences. The words Becca and Howie use are informal as they are very emotionally driven. They both are upset, hurt, and frustrated not only with each other, but with how neither can seem to cope on even ground. The use of concrete words are abundant as they both talk about possessions of Danny’s: his clothes, his artwork, and the family dog. The sentences Becca and Howie speak are shorter towards the beginning of the scene, and become longer as the overall dramatic tension increases. Some beats are written in the script before a sentence begins to give time to take in the emotions coming from the previous sentence as well as what might possibly follow. Between the two characters, Howie seems to speak with more exclamations, Becca with more statements. This is due to Howie revealing what he feels

Shill 2 Becca is doing and doing so with frustration, and Becca giving explanations in response. There seems to be an internal arrangement placed within this scene. It begins with Howie discovering the tape has been recorded over, bringing it to Becca’s attention, and asking her if she was sure she didn’t do it on purpose. This leads to him bringing up things of Danny’s being put away or given away as well as Becca wanting to sell their house. The resting point occurs right after the following line: “It’s not just the tape! I’m not talking about the tape, Becca! It’s Taz, and the paintings, and the clothes, and it’s everything! Y  ou have to stop erasing him! You have to stop! You HAVE TO STOP!” (Lindsay-Abaire 64). Becca’s response to Howie’s exclamation makes the tension slightly decrease. The ending sees Howie needing something to be different and stating he wants their dog Taz back. All feelings have been let out by both characters. Though how they cope and how they feel about things is conflicting, Howie is insistent on something changing. Act 2 scene 2 shows Becca’s mother, Nat, helping her clean out Danny’s room. The dialogue between the mother and daughter is fairly casual at first, only saying a few words back and forth to each other to determine whether or not something was to be kept or thrown away. These sentences are very short and simple. The words used at the beginning of this scene are more formal, especially when Becca is telling her mother about the class she’s started taking. The way Becca speaks is an attempt to make her seem void of a lot of emotion, especially when she brings up her estranged friend, Debbie. This leads to a significant shift in the dialogue. The sentences, namely the ones spoken by Nat, become more compound and complex. The story Nat

Shill 3 tells Becca about her former friend Maureen is comedic and seems as if it was meant to lighten the mood, but it also demonstrates a mother’s desire to make her daughter feel better about something she knows is bothering her. Nat has gone through a similar loss, so she attempts to provide an example of a different way outsiders respond to a child’s death in order to relate to her daughter. This scene seems to have more of an external arrangement. The stories Nat tells Becca about Maureen constantly being at her home after Arthur’s death and Danny eating several chocolate espresso beans on Mother’s day are like little scenes within the scene. Towards the conclusion of the scene, the dialogue between Becca and Nat becomes less casual and reminiscent and more motivating and moving. Nat’s use of figurative language to describe how the feelings that come from the loss of a child change over time (the “brick in the pocket”) gives Becca a very real but comforting feeling as to what she can potentially expect as time goes on. This interaction with her mother is the final step Becca takes towards moving a little more forward from Danny’s death. This play is a whirlwind of many differing emotions. Grief, depression, anger, fear, uncertainty, hope, understanding. It also provides a wide variety of language and dialogue. The characters feel like very real people going through loss in their own unique ways. How they think and how they feel changes in different situations. The way they speak fluctuates on several occasions. To me, there is a balance between the length of sentences and significance the words within them give off. Sometimes less is more in this play. Sometimes a little more needs to be said in order to get something very important across to another character. This makes the whole story and the characters seem real and relevant to the audience. Whether or not they can relate to

Shill 4 the characters’ experiences, they feel they’ve learned something about the inevitable processes of loss....