At their best, one-person plays have the intimacy and urgency of an encounter with someone who needs to get something off his or her chest, ideally portrayed by an actor who compels us to listen. Two such plays—Simon Stephens’s Sea Wall and Nick Payne’s A Life—open as a twin set next month at the Public Theater.
Under the direction of the smashing Carrie Cracknell, each is a short monologue that, beneath its spare surface, grapples with profound questions about life, death, and identity.
In A Life, Gyllenhaal plays a man struggling to reconcile his emotions surrounding the death of his father and the birth of his daughter. Originally titled The Art of Dying, the piece started as a monologue that Payne performed at London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2013, in the aftermath of his own father’s death.
