Ok so, Congratulations MR. BEE !!!!!!!

By Elizabeth Maupin Sentinel Theater Critic Everybody knows a family like Becca’s. The mother who’s a little flaky. The younger sister who can’t do anything right. And Becca herself, who holds everything inside herself when her relatives let it all hang out. Maybe they have nothing in common. But they’re family — and with family, you find how to keep it together when the worst tries to tear you apart. That’s the seed of Rabbit Hole, a sweet-tempered, often very funny play about families and the worst that can happen. That it’s sad is a given. That it’s also enlivening is a gift. David Lindsay-Abaire’s comic drama, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, has almost nothing but dysfunctional families in common with his earlier comedies, which have won fans at Theatre Downtown. Anyone who remembers Fuddy Meers — the story of a woman with amnesia and a limping kidnapper with a lisp — will find a completely different world in Rabbit Hole, where an ordinary family tries to get by after the accidental death of their 4-year-old boy. The suggestion of Lewis Carroll’s Alice falling through the rabbit hole is an apt one: Neither Becca nor her husband Howie, her mother Nat and sister Izzy knows how to cope after Danny’s death, and for each of them it’s a different but equally strange new world. Those familial differences and the bonds that balance them show up in perfect focus in Theatre Downtown’s production, which Kevin Bee has directed with a beautiful sense of understatement. Look at the three women, and you can almost see a family resemblance — Jamie-Lyn Hawkins’ Becca sharp-featured and restrained; Jennifer Gannon’s Izzy slump-shouldered and sloppy, like a less defined version of her sister; Lori McCaskill’s Nat rounded and genial, but just as self-contained as her daughters are in their separate ways. They act like family, too, with a warmth that links them despite a sudden jab of meanness or a bout of overly polite. You can see the way Dean Walkuski’s Howie fits in — the tensions between him and Becca, the strain between him and the two other women he wound up with when he married his wife. Hawkins’ quiet Becca, searching unremittingly for a way to go on, is the focus, and you can see the character growing as she opens up, in two lovely scenes, with Jason, the boy who caused the auto accident, and then with Nat. Walkuski, playing a good, solid family man, shows you anger, desperation and a pitiable reluctance to let go. Gannon makes an adorable Izzy, trying her best to do the right thing for once; McCaskill is a funny, outspoken Nat; and Josh Paul makes the teenage Jason so unsure, bright and sweet that you want him around to stay. Jason believes in parallel universes, and that’s a comfort to Becca — to think that somewhere else her family lives on unharmed. “So this is just the sad version of us,” she says. They aresad, but they’re also putting one foot in front of the other, and they’re finding how to live this new life. It’s a remarkable portrait of unremarkable people. And somehow that makes you feel good. Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426. ‘Rabbit Hole’ What: Theatre Downtown production of David Lindsay-Abaire play. Where: Theatre Downtown, 2113 N. Orange Ave., Orlando.  When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, through April 26 (also, 2:30 p.m. April 20). Cost: $18 general, $15 seniors and students. Call: 407-841-0083. Online: theatredowntown.net.