Review: MEET ME AT DAWN is a Contemplative Look at Managing Grief

Upstream Theatre closest its 20th season with Zinnie Harris’ MEET ME AT DAWN. Harris, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), is a British playwright, screenwriter, and director. Her works are known for contemporary or reframed female characters inspired by classic literature.  

MEET ME AT DAWN opens with two women, Robyn (Lizi Watt) and Helen (Michelle Hand), washing up on the shore of a deserted hazy island follow a boating accident. Both are drained, battered, and grateful to have reached land. 

Helen emerges from the ocean pumped with fight-or-flight adrenaline. She is brimming with optimism and believes their rescue is a certainty. Robyn, who reached the island first, knows their rescue is not imminent. She is filled with fear and a sense a doom that manifests in gut wrenching nausea. Robyn’s clearer stream of consciousness foreshadows grim prospects that both will be rescued. 

Helen and Robyn cannot see land through the tiny island’s haze making it unlikely someone will find the marooned women on the ethereal island. Both begin to question where they have landed. Did they survive the accident or have both been lost at sea and are now trapped in some type of limbo? 

MEET ME AT DAWN, inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, is a story about processing deep grief and loss. Director Larissa Lury creates a serene surrealism that grants bereaved partners answers to overcome stinging loss. She entrenches her characters into the narrative’s incorporeal space between life and death to grapple with the stages of grief. Lury, her actors, and designers collaborate to create spiritual uneasiness in an immortal space. 

Lury restricts her blocking to the borders of Patrick Huber’s tiny isle set design to confine Helen and Robyn to a subnormal space. Huber’s diminutive set basks in Tony Anselmo’s natural lighting design and Kristi Gunther’s tranquil sound design that contrast the story’s deep emotional turmoil. Gunther’s lapping waves, gentle sea breezes, and calling seagulls create a peaceful seascape.  

Actors Michelle Hand and Lizi Watt offer plaintively evocative performances as Helen and Robyn. Each reveal denial, anger, bargaining, and depression on their way to acceptance. Both show stunning emotional expressiveness through their dialogue and the physical embodiment of their anguish, but it is the palpability of their vulnerable connectedness that projects a deeply bonded intimacy. 

It is the actors’ togetherness, perceptible love, and profound loss that make Helen and Robyn’s despair real. Hand and Watt portray meaningful devotion that engenders appreciable audience sympathy. As the characters move toward acceptance, the actors convey Helen and Robyn’s shifting perspectives through silent and moving introspection.  

MEET ME AT DAWN is not macabre or depressing but it is sorrowfully somber in tone. Michelle Hand and Lizi Watt enmesh with contemplative, cathartic, and pensive portrayals. The subtleties in their doleful performances are as impressive as their outward acting. Larissa Lury’s solemn direction creates ruminative storytelling with long-lasting effect. 

MEET ME AT DAWN continues at The Marcelle Theater through April 27, 2025. For more information on production dates and tickets visit https://www.upstreamtheater.org/