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The Dolly (American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) 1984)Play is rife with emotional tension as family loyalties are tested to the ultimate.... Without being explicit, author Locke is deeply revealing.... The variety of interrelationships set up by Locke are subtle, intricate, satisfying. The play works on several levels, and the conclusion is neither predictable nor, for that matter, conclusive. Variety ...pure sizzling drama... Hollywood Reporter ...courageous, necessary, important work.... Locke’s script is less about incest than about the terrible pressures on, and divided loyalties within a family when incest is revealed.... The play rivets the viewer to the stage as we watch painful confrontations.... powerful, compelling... San Francisco Chronicle 
There have been several productions of The Dolly. Each is my favorite, each in its own way. But the very first production remains perhaps the most vivid for two very good reasons: it was the first time I had ever heard the lines delivered (and there was consequently a lot of rewriting during rehearsals!) and it starred the now famous but always fabulous Annette Bening. You can see from the photos on this page how young and vulnerable Annette was, which leant to the poignancy of the role of Deborah, a complex, secretive, deceitful, yet ultimately heroic character. 
Look at Annette’s hand, its tension. I remember that she played barefoot through much of the play. In the very sweet scene where she is singing her six-year-old daughter Susan to sleep with “Silent Night”, when Susan begins to tell her, “Me and Grandpa gots a secret” and when Deborah slowly begins to understand what the secret might be and when she finally, very gently leads Susan to whisper the words she dreads, “He touched me,” Annette’s long feet curled up with the most electrifying tension. It was an exquisite moment of theatre. Among so many memories of this first production, I have two that are most stark, both centering around Annette. Early in rehearsals our director Larry Hecht led Annette into a mesmerizing moment when he asked her to imagine what it was like, night after night, for Deborah as an eleven-year-old to wait for her father to come to her bedroom door, knowing what would follow. Annette lay back in her chair and closed her eyes and quietly started to describe it for us, her hand making arcs in the air as she sank into that hideous past. When Annette was finished, I quickly handwrote all she had given us, and it still is at the heart of both the stage play and the recent screenplay I have written. Very late in rehearsals, after Annette and Steve had already put together exquisite moments of brilliance, intimacy and violence in alternation, Larry took Annette aside and had a private talk over in the corner of the rehearsal room. When Annette returned to the scene, I was quietly horrified at what she was doing; all the exquisite moments were gone, replaced by a godawful shyness and awkward, embarrassing and utterly over-the-top acting. I remember going home that afternoon sick at heart and uncomprehending. But the next day's rehearsal revealed Annette's and Larry's craft: it was as if Annette had emptied herself of all previous choices in order to explore all the flavors of this new choice, shyness, which she had layered into the whole. Annette's Deborah was already a profound well of secrecy and deceit, but now at bottom was a heartwrenching creature, a woman whose girl-within had been driven so deeply down this pit by her father's nightly predation that the tender young mother and timid wife—whom that girl has become—can barely breathe. And when this broken, bruised woman is faced with the crisis of protecting her own daughter from the same predation… well, that is true drama. The Dolly has had a long and notable history of excellent performances. Click here to see reviews, posters and photographs from some of them. Notice particularly these words from the review of Toronto’s Eran and Eclectic Theatre production: “There are occasionally in theatre those isolated seconds of energy where the tension shimmers around the audience creating an electrifying ambience of complete silent symbiosis...” Yes, that is exactly what happened night after night in all of these performances. Click here for my own most memorable and most poignant audience responses. NOTE 2013: I have now written The Dolly as a screenplay. I loved getting deeper into these characters, giving Laird and Jim more background, and looking far more clearly down that deep well that is Deborah. I also loved being able to get out of the apartment and finding new ways to get across the story elements, no longer limited to merely the dialogue. I did not revisit the stage version as I wrote; though, of course, the best of the dialogue is still there, fresh. The outing of the truth in ACT II, for me, is still the heart of the story, changed almost not at all in this retelling, Laird even more in the grasp of his competing love for both his father and his wife, digging beyond his depth, knowing it, fearing it, terrified yet going deeper and deeper to get all the worst elements of the buried, vile secrets. Click here to read the entire screenplay.
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