Review of Reconsidering Hanna(h) by Deirdre Girard, at the Boston Playwright's Theatre

Hanna(h) stalks over the main stage with murder in her eyes and a hatchet in her hand. Her insane scowls drift into the full-house audience at the Boston Playwright’s Theatre demanding answers, two sets of what will become seat-squirming, unsettling answers. Each set belongs to a very different Hanna(h). First, there is the Puritan Hannah Duston, mother of eight children, whom the Abenaki Indians took hostage in 1697 during a raid on the town of Haverhill. Second, there is present day Hanna, an international career journalist recently returned from Afghanistan and now dealing with the murder of her journalist husband. This Hanna directs obscenity-laced barbs at friends and antagonists alike as she investigates her seventeenth- century namesake with intellectual stubbornness and a developing sense of intimacy.  Celeste Oliva plays both Hanna(h)s seamlessly, so seamlessly she changes clothes and personalities in front of us, her ego-altering facial expressions successfully suspending any notion of pedestrian disbelief. For more of my review of Reconsidering Hanna(h) go here:  http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2014/09/reconsidering-hannah-by-deirdre-girard.html