Daphne – 09 November 2023

The experience of seeing Daphne off Broadway at Lincoln Center felt like watching early independent films where it was hard to discern exactly what I was seeing. My brain was engaged in trying to figure it all out, and oftentimes my questions about one scene would continue to occupy space in my head as the next scene (which was completely disconnected) progressed in front of me.

I haven’t felt this confused in a theatre in a long time.

Daphne really felt like an experience. There were scenes where I felt some emotion rise in me that evoked feelings and ideas that resonated in a very real way. But there were also scenes that I didn’t understand and was unsure about. As a result, I kept going in and out of understanding what I was looking at.

By the end of the play, I had a lot of theories. The main thing I was hung up on was not being able to tell whose perspective we were seeing, and at what point in time. There were moments when it felt like I was seeing everything from Winona’s perspective, and others from Daphne’s. There were moments where I thought Winona was the protagonist, looking back on the damage she had done to Daphne, or that Winona’s anxiety about the damage she could do to Daphne was playing out in a fantasy of her own making at the start of the relationship and the action of the play was reflective of Winona’s feelings about starting a relationship at all. There were moments when I thought Daphne was puzzling through Winona’s abuse and the scenes were disconnected because she was suffering from trauma.

All of this sounds very interesting, and it was. But as artists, the creative team of Daphne did not make any choices. They let the audience think whatever they wanted to think, walk away with whatever they wanted to walk away with. The level of ambiguity in this play had the audience puzzling over plot points, trying to figure out what really happened on a very tangible level. As a direct result, people weren’t processing the higher order themes of the play—loneliness and trauma and pain and isolation and fear.

I was privileged to be there on a night with a talkback, and was very surprised by how many of the Q&A questions did not get answered. It seemed as though the answer to everything the audience wanted to know was “we let the audience figure that out for themselves.” It didn’t feel like a satisfying answer. Truthfully, it felt like the cast members themselves didn’t actually know what they were presenting, and were conceptualizing the show on a scene-by-scene basis. It disturbed me a little that they felt comfortable working on a serious, emotional piece without really knowing what it was about.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.