Deirdre O’Connell, who played a woman who was violently abducted by a white supremacist in Lucas Hnath’s one-woman drama “Dana H.,” won the Tony for best leading actress in a play.
And she did it without speaking a single word onstage.
In accepting the award, she said: “I would love for this little prize to be a token for every person who is wondering, ‘Should I be trying to make something that could work on Broadway or that could win me a Tony Award, or should I be making the weird art that is haunting me, that frightens me, that I don’t know how to make, that I don’t know if anyone in the whole world will understand?’”
“Please let me standing here,” she continued, “be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”
O’Connell, 70, who lip-synced the entire 75-minute testimony of the protagonist, Dana Higginbotham — Hnath’s mother, who was abducted by an ex-convict and a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in 1997 — told The New York Times at a pre-Tonys event last month that she wasn’t initially sure whether the work of lip syncing would be pleasurable or painful.
“At first I was like ‘Why can’t we just do it as a monologue. Why can’t I just act?’” she said. “It became very clear why not. The piece is so much about surrendering to our capacity for empathy for another person.”
“Dana H.,” which ran Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater in 2020 before opening on Broadway in October, was a favorite with critics. Jesse Green, chief theater critic for The New York Times, called the production “profoundly disturbing” and praised O’Connell for “brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor.”
“Call it Thriller Karaoke, a form in which the story is almost as dangerous as the mode of storytelling,” he wrote. “You worry that O’Connell will fall out of sync with the recording, which never stops once the play begins.”
Despite critical acclaim, ticket sales did not follow, and the production, which had been alternating performances with “Is This a Room,” the verbatim drama by Tina Satter, closed two months early in November after just 25 performances.
This is the first Tony win for O’Connell, a beloved veteran of Off Broadway stages who won an Obie Award for the role in the 2020 production at the Vineyard (she is currently onstage in Playwrights Horizon’s production of Will Arbery’s “Corsicana”).
The director, Les Waters, and the sound designer, Mikhail Fiksel, were also nominated.
Matt Stevens contributed reporting.
