Aubrey Plaza Made her Stage Debut in ‘Danny and the Deep Blue Sea’

Aubrey Plaza’s career in entertainment has taken her to the stage in New York City. She recently starred alongside Christopher Abbott in the off-Broadway revival of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.

The Puerto Rican actress has been on the rise for the last two decades. From Parks and Recreation to White Lotus, she’s well-known for her quirky yet relatable characters on screen.

Aubrey Plaza (sourced from Instagram)

This show is certainly a career highlight.

Set in The Bronx, the one-act play is a tragic, poignant, and sometimes funny account of Roberta and Danny, two unlikely people who fall in love in one evening. Hardened by past trauma, unwanted by friends and family, they are outcasts, suspicious of love—yet deeply desperate to be seen, truly seen, and maybe even loved for who they are.

Plaza and Abbot delivered grounded, honest performances on stage. Their nuanced portrayals of loneliness, violence, and mental instability gave a fairly simple plot an extraordinary arc.

In the first scene, set at a dive bar past midnight, 31-year-old Roberta (against all odds) convinces 29-year-old Danny (injured and using crutches) to come home with her. And Danny, failing to offer her any reason not to, eventually obliges.

Then, in Roberta’s bedroom, their dispositions change completely. They make love, they talk about love, they fall in love, and (in short) they get carried away. After planning their wedding, they fall asleep in each other’s arms.

The next morning, Roberta faces her stifled sense of reality. She tells Danny to get out, to forget everything she inadvertently said about getting married. This time, Danny convinces Roberta to stay with him. And Roberta, failing to offer him any reason not to, eventually accepts his love.

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (sourced from Instagram)

In Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, we experience a dark, accidental love story between two loners who have seemingly given up on the quest for love. What this story suggests is that love can outweigh even the most dangerous of inner-demons.

In a New York Times review, Elisabeth Vincentelli writes:

“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea also bears quite a few markers of a certain kind of gritty theater from the 1970s and ’80s, centering as it does on bruised working-class characters whose lives are permeated with brutality.”

Unlike film acting, Plaza not only returned to the character often, but performed the story over and over again. In this way, the actors had no choice but to make new discoveries, to continue pulling emotional material from their own lives to bring objectives to life in character-form.

Catching up with Plaza after the show, I was surprised to find out Abbott had actually injured his leg. His limp and his crutches were real and made part of the story!

Plaza also said she was happy to be back in New York, where she lived for many years while attending New York University.

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea ran until January 2024 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. For actors, regardless of cultural background, this play is a wonderful resource for monologues, scene work, and character development.