Slap Me, Choke Me, Love Me

In Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Christopher Abbott and Aubrey Plaza play messed-up people in a messed-up love story.

- Nate Jones

IS A SLAP WORSE than a grope? Does a push (on the forehead) hit harder than a pull (of the hair)? These were the questions that occupied Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, and their director, Jeff Ward, during a recent rehearsal for the Off Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. The play follows Danny and Roberta, two Bronx down-and-outs who open their hearts to each other and frequently draw blood. In Shanleyville, emotions are operatic, accents are outer-borough, and a kiss, as Dean Martin once sang, is a kick in the head. ¶ On a rainy Monday at a dance studio across from City Hall, the actors were rehearsing a sequence near the end of Scene One. Danny, who calls himself “the beast,” has just confessed to killing a guy in a fight (he thinks). When he viciously rebuffs Roberta’s attempt at connection, she shows her own beastly side. Plaza was standing above Abbott, berating him with a stream-of-consciousness string of sexual insults—“Do you get off on pigs rubbin’ their shoes on your ugly dick-lick face, you lowlife beefcake faggot?”—after which he would explode out of his chair and choke her. Ward had already cut a slap later in the play that felt too much like “Jake LaMotta fanfic,” but he kept the choke. “It’s not an act of violence; it’s actually an act of restraint,” he told the actors. “He’s like, ‘I’m holding back 99 percent of what I want to do.’ ”