Creekside Theatre Fest | The Liahona Theatre for the Community, Pleasant Grove, UT
David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole opens with a bar-fight story. It is funny, vulgar, and entirely beside the point — which is exactly the point. Izzy has arrived at her sister Becca’s kitchen to tell a funny story, and Becca cannot hear it. The laughter keeps curdling into judgment: “Were you drunk? Were you on anything? I thought you were getting it together.” Before the audience can settle into the comedy, the grief underneath it surfaces. The play announces itself through indirection, which is where it lives for the next two hours. Creekside Theatre Fest’s production, directed by David Morley Walker, understands this and honors it, even when it cannot always sustain it.
Rabbit Hole premiered on Broadway in 2006 at the Biltmore Theatre, with Cynthia Nixon as Becca — a role that earned her the Tony Award for Best Actress. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the following year. Many will also know it through the 2010 film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. It is a significant piece of contemporary American theater, and not one that turns up often on community stages. That Creekside has taken it on is itself worth noting.
The play is set eight months after the death of four-year-old Danny Corbett, who followed the family dog through an unlatched gate and into the path of a car. Lindsay-Abaire never makes the accident the subject, but the aftermath: what people say to each other when they don’t know what to say, what they do with objects when the person they belonged to is gone, how two people who love each other can become unreachable. Canon Hadfield‘s set design earns early credit — the Black Box at the Liahona Theatre is intimate enough that the details matter, and Hadfield has filled it with them: toys, a fully built kitchen with a fridge, a running faucet, the lived-in disorder of a house still processing what has happened. Melody Hadfield‘s properties design and Jen Christensen‘s costumes do the same, grounding everything in the specific world of a comfortable suburban home that has quietly come undone.
Jeanelle Huff and Kristian Huff anchor the production as Becca and Howie — and are, in fact, married in real life. The chemistry is there, but you wouldn’t necessarily know they are married from this play, which is exactly right. Becca’s grief pushes outward: boxing up baby clothes, taking baby photos off the fridge, wanting to sell the house, sending the dog to her mother’s. While Howie’s pulls inward: watching a tape of their son after Becca goes to bed, holding onto every object, going to a support group. Neither is right. Neither is wrong. The acting throughout is great.
It is worth noting what the playwright, Lindsay-Abaire, does to balance these two characters. Becca can read as cold and somewhat controlling, but small details bring real warmth to her — she makes crème caramel from scratch, she types out a three-page recipe for her sister to take home. The baking gives her an identity beyond her grief, and Huff uses it well. Howie, meanwhile, is immediately likable: open, warm, easy to root for, and becomes gradually less so as the play goes on and his own failings surface. Lindsay-Abaire has done a careful job making sure neither character holds all the sympathy.
The tape-erasure scene that ends Act One is the production’s emotional peak. Becca has accidentally recorded a tornado documentary over the most recent home video of Danny — the one with the park, Mexico, Christmas. The discovery tears open everything that has been accumulating. Becca’s response to Howie’s accusation that she is trying to erase their son is the moral center of the play, and Jeanelle Huff delivers it with precision: “You’re not in a better place than I am, you’re just in a different place. And that sucks that we can’t be there for each other right now, but that’s just the way it is.”
Jenessa Ihrig‘s Izzy arrives bearing comic energy and a pregnancy announcement timed with the universe’s characteristic indifference, and she navigates the irreverence skillfully. The play needs Izzy’s laughter; without it, the evening would be intolerably heavy.
Shauna Thompson‘s Nat is the voice of hard-won experience; well-meaning, occasionally maddening, and ultimately the one who delivers the play’s most honest line. When Becca finally asks the question that has been underneath everything: “Does it ever go away?” Nat’s answer is the most truthful thing anyone says all evening: “It doesn’t go away, but it changes. It becomes something you can carry. Like a brick in your pocket.” In Thompson and Huff’s hands, that moment lands with the quiet force of something true.
Nat’s dinner-party digression, meandering from the Kennedy curse to Aristotle Onassis, who offered a reward to anyone who could explain his son’s accidental death, is the play’s most ambitious scene. “People want things to make sense,” she says, arriving finally at Danny. Thompson keeps Nat warm and a little tipsy and somewhat oblivious to the weight of what she’s saying, which is exactly right.
Henry Jeppeson plays Jason Willette, the seventeen-year-old who accidentally killed Danny. There is no villain here, only accident and its aftermath. The role offers limited dramatic surface, and there are moments where more tension might have been found, but the gentleness he brings serves the play. If you find yourself wondering about the title as you watch — it means more than it first appears to.
Walker‘s direction makes this complex piece feel personal and relatable in the intimate space. The conversational rhythms, the way characters talk over one another, the patterns of connection and missed connection — all of it has been carefully shaped. Zac Bringhurst‘s sound and light design serve the quieter moments well — unobtrusive, never intruding, letting the performances carry what they need to carry, however I was impressed by how extensive the sound design was (birds chirping, dogs barking, etc…). Lindsay-Abaire’s dialogue sounds exactly like how people actually talk. Devastating information arrives tucked inside ordinary exchanges about custard and bathroom sets and the dog getting fat. You can almost miss how precisely constructed it is.
What is particularly valuable about Rabbit Hole is that it approaches grief without faith as a safety net. Becca won’t go to the support group because all they talk about is God’s plan with lines like “at least he’s in a better place,” and “God needed another angel.” The play doesn’t dismiss faith; Nat has it, and it genuinely helps her, but the play doesn’t insist on it either. Even Jason qualifies his parallel universes with a teenager’s casual precision: “assuming you believe in science.” In a cultural landscape where grief stories so often reach for the spiritual, that honesty is refreshing.
What 17-year-old Jason’s scene with Becca delivers is one of the play’s most unexpected moments. His science fiction story is about parallel universes — other versions of ourselves living out different outcomes. Becca absorbs this and says, almost to herself: “Well, that’s a nice thought. Somewhere out there, I’m having a good time.” It is a small line, almost throwaway, and yet it is the closest thing to comfort the play offers before its final scene.
Final Thoughts
Above all else, Rabbit Hole perfectly portrays how people grieve differently and how that difference can drive a wedge even in a marriage between two people who love each other and are doing their best. What works for one person won’t work for another. One thread the play introduces and never resolves is a hint that Howie may have been unfaithful: a significant thing to leave hanging, and the one element that frustrated me. And yet perhaps that too is the point: this is a play that consistently refuses to give its audience the resolutions they want. Whether that feels true to life or simply unfinished will depend on the viewer.
This is not a play you will get many chances to see, and the fact that Creekside has staged it this well is worth celebrating. One honest note: the script dates from 2006 and contains a slur directed at people with disabilities that reflects the casual language of that era and would not be written today. Nothing that derails the evening, but worth knowing going in.
Leaving the theater, someone remarked on the phone: “I just watched a play that was a major bummer.” Fair enough. Several people in the audience were crying at various points throughout the evening. I think it is worth pointing out that while I think this play renders loss and grief with accuracy, I have not personally lost someone from my immediate family or a partner, and whether this show would trigger that grief in someone who has lived it, or offer something closer to comfort, I genuinely cannot say. Go in clear-eyed about what you are walking into, and it may well be one of the more meaningful evenings of theater you have this summer.
Show Details
Production Credits: Directed by David Morley Walker. Stage Manager: Kylie Christensen. Set Design: Canon Hadfield. Costume Design: Jen Christensen. Properties Design: Melody Hadfield. Wig Design: Krissa Lent. Sound Design: Zac Bringhurst, David Morley Walker, Samantha Chizmadia. Light Design: Zac Bringhurst. Tech Crew: Samantha Chizmadia. Technical Director: Brian Hadfield.
Rabbit Hole runs through June 19, 2026 at The Liahona Theatre for the Community, 2464 W. 450 S., Pleasant Grove, UT. Performances are at 8:00 PM. Post-show talkback sessions with cast and crew are scheduled for June 13 and June 18. Tickets are $25 for adults and $20 for youth (4–11) and seniors (62+), available at cur8.com. The season also includes Persuasion, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and A Year With Frog and Toad. Full schedule at creeksidetheatrefest.org.
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