Dana H: Who’s playing who?

You can’t help but focus on actress Jordan Baker’s mouth during the first few minutes of “Dana H.”, now on stage at the Berkeley Rep. A harrowing account of the two months that playwright Lucas Hnath’s mother was held captive by a white supremacist kidnapper and the years-long aftermath of that event, “Dana H.” is also a dense strata of storytelling strategies, the foremost of which is played out on Baker’s lips.

If you’ve been exposed to any of the publicity about Hnath’s play since its Los Angeles debut in 2019, you go in knowing that each production’s lead actress spends almost her entire performance lip-syncing to a recording of the real Dana Higginbotham recounting her terrifying tale to a heard but unseen interviewer.

In fact, the impact of the play partially depends upon on your prior awareness of this central conceit. So, at Berkeley, you find yourself staring at Baker’s mouth as you listen to the same audiotape of Dana’s voice that Baker is hearing through earbuds. You find yourself seeking out misalignment of lips and words, searching for gaps, errors, and imprecisions — anything that will reveal the situation’s artifice.

Baker’s acting — not just the movement of her lips, but the rise and fall of her breath, her hand gestures, and the way her shifting body underscores Dana’s tones of voice — is pretty much perfectly calibrated to what…