Review: Adam Rapp's NOCTURNE Starring Drew Eberhard Will Break Your Heart

“Bricks can tumble from clear blue skies…” --Stephen Sondheim, “Now You Know” from Merrily We Roll Along

“Where the hell am I?” --Steely Dan, “Hey Nineteen”

My father’s mom died in 1955.  After my own mother passed away fifty-one years later, one of my sisters asked my father the following question: “How long did it take you to get over the loss of your mother?”  My father, now an old man, pondered the question, remembering his mother who had died a half century earlier, then answered quite succinctly but with a sad smile: “I’ll let you know.”

That’s the thing about grief.  It never leaves.  It becomes a key part to our existence, like a missing limb or a large scar that we try to conceal.  We think we can hide it or put it away, but then it bubbles up in other surprising ways.  After my sister died in 2021, I thought I had gotten over the loss.  Then months later, I watched one of the monologues in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, about a woman dying in a hospital, and I just lost it.  Broke down crying and couldn’t stop the waterworks.  My grief had never completely gone away; I was just an expert at hiding it before then.

Those are the thoughts and feelings that came to mind after watching Drew Eberhard’s bravura turn in Adam Rapp’s heart-tearing one-man show, NOCTURNE, which ended its run at the intimate Studio 620 last weekend (but will open at another location this May). It’s haunting, poignant, surprisingly humorous at times and also soul-crushingly sad.  This is not a show where you leave the theater skipping down the aisles; this is one that you ponder, that hold close to your heart, and that you re-examine days later. 

In it, Mr. Eberhard plays the likable unnamed narrator, a 32-year-old writer whose apartment is cluttered with stacks of books.  They’re everywhere, even hanging from strings on the ceiling, covers spread like a flock of birds in flight.  Discarded papers fill the wastebasket, and a piano hovers on stage left.  The narrator talks directly to the audience, reliving the day that tragically changed his life and the consequences of that ill-fated day. 

When he was seventeen and a budding concert pianist, he was driving a car, listening to “Hey Nineteen” on the radio, singing along loudly to the classic Steely Dan song, when he suddenly hits something.  That something turns out to be his nine-year-old sister on roller skates, instantly killing her.  It’s more gruesome than you’re prepared for, as horrifying a description of any accident that I can recall (the crash is like Hereditary meets The Sweet Hereafter). What makes it even more powerful, more emotionally wrenching,  is the matter-of-fact quality in the storytelling, the narrator describing the horrid details in an almost detached manner.  “Fifteen years ago I killed my sister,” he tells us. “It's dumb-sounding, the way most facts are. Like a former president or the names of bones.  Grover Cleveland.  Fibula. Tibia. Femur.”

The accident would mark a decisive change in the young man. The sister is not the only casualty; the young man and his parents become mere shells, corpses in all but their heartbeats.  The narrator, filled with an abundance of guilt, would disengage with his parents; his mother would be put in a mental hospital while his father will slowly waste away due to testicular cancer. And the son would have major intimacy issues where, at thirty-two, he still remains a virgin. 

The narrator’s visit to his father fifteen years after the accident is the most emotional part of the show, its true heart.  How do two people, disengaged for over a decade, finally come to terms with themselves and with their grief?  It’s so real, and we swear we’re watching the father and son talking to each other, reconciling, but it’s one man up there telling this tale. My hats off to Mr. Eberhard bringing this to life.

NOCTURNE is an early work by Mr. Rapp, and this may be the Bay Area premiere of it.   It’s beautifully written, sometimes even overwritten, but you forgive that because that’s who the narrator is: A published novelist, where writing on his old school Underwood typewriter becomes his beacon, his savior.  He  knows how to string along a story, to pause at just the right times, to jump from place to place, allusion to allusion, without losing the audience in the process.  The descriptions hit just right, such as his describing the taste of Coors as “warm and aluminum.” 

NOCTURNE proves to be a fast ninety minutes without intermission, although in the middle it drags a bit and our minds wander from the show’s tone which seems to be stranded on the Isle of Sameness. But as NOCTURNE rears into its final moments, we get the show’s standout “scene” where the father and son reconnect.  And their reunion thankfully lacks sentimentality, making it even stronger, starker. 

Drew Eberhard gets quite a workout here.  He doesn’t bulldoze his way through the script; he takes his time, telling us in a voice that seems almost deflated.  But then at key intervals he bursts to life, like in his last moment before the tragedy, so joyful and devil-may-care as he croons along with the A.M. radio, singing the lines from a Steely Dan song, “The Cuervo Gold…The fine Colombian…Make tonight a wonderful thing…”

But the night wouldn’t be a wonderful thing.  Fate, or whatever you want to call it, would get in the way.  Or as the he narrator puts it: “Tragedy’s poker, God’s ugly deck of cards.”  Grief, as the narrator tells us, “does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse…it simply changes temperature.” 

NOCTURNE, wonderfully directed by Alan Mahoney Jr., is terrifically paced but a tough show.  It’s also quite meaningful and so moving that you can’t shake it off.  It brings you back to your own sadnesses in life, the tragedies that caught you by surprise, the bricks tumbling from clear blue skies, as Mr. Sondheim put it. It may give you PTSD, even if your life events aren’t nearly as dramatic as those spotlighted in NOCTURNE.   But it needs to be experienced because, as the narrator/writer shows us, life can be unbearably painful, but it’s ultimately art and the act of writing that can save us, and him, in the end.

Photo courtesy of STAGE PHOTOGRAPHY OF TAMPA, LLC (SPOT).