Gags Galore

Review of The 39 Steps, Music Theatre of Connecticut

Enter the wacky world of spies in England and Scotland between the two great wars of last century. Adapted by Patrick Barlow for the stage, from John Buchan’s 1915 novel by way of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 thriller, The 39 Steps, directed by Pamela Hill at Music Theatre of Connecticut, keeps up a steady pace of escapes and oddball encounters, with the tone of an espionage story jettisoned in favor of skit comedy and slapstick. With all characters played by four actors, and the artifice of theater exposed right on the stage, props get put through their paces and the audience is made to indulge its imagination.

Richard Hannay (Gary Lindemann), Annabella Schmidt (Laura Cable) (photos from Music Theatre of Connecticut)

MTC likes such stripped down staging, as it has shown with its staged radio shows, and much of the charm of the show comes from a willingness to make theater a frenetic game of make-believe. That starts with Gary Lindemann’s Richard Hanny, a posh Brit who lounges about narrating his ennui before being catapulted into a series of dangerous predicaments by way of an encounter with Annabella Schmidt, a mysterious German woman played with hilarious creepiness by Laura Cable. Lindemann’s Hanny is a kind of unflappable Everyman, even if there’s nothing at all everyday about his adventures.

Pamela (Laura Cable), Richard Hannay (Gary Lindemann)

The acting here is turned up a few notches from the kind of overplaying you’d find—played for real—in B movies, or on radio programs. The situations also smack of radio shows, with visualization a key part of the effect—except, of course, for the sight gags. My favorite features Lindemann and Cable—as Pamela, a skeptical woman pressed into aiding Hannay—handcuffed together and trying to get over a stile. And the bit when she removed her stockings while handcuffed makes comedy of discomfort.

Clown #2 (Matt Densky), Clown #1 (Jim Schilling)

The play is designed to let such tomfoolery go on as long as it can, particularly the many bits furnished by the two clowns, Matt Densky and Jim Schilling. It helps that Schilling bears a resemblance to that great veteran of televised skit comedy, Tim Conway. When Schilling mutters and putters around, setting up chairs for a speech, or has to carry several chairs offstage at once, the gags are vintage Conway. As the other Clown, Matt Densky tends to specialize in outrageous voices—I don’t think I’ll ever forget how his diabolical German says “Mr. Hannay!”

Clown #2 (Matt Densky)

The presence of diabolical Germans and slow-witted Scots (without quite as funny an accent as you’d expect) and bland society types and traveling lingerie salesmen, to say nothing of the many caps Schilling juggles as cop, train conductor, and passenger, lets us experience a parade of characters as matters of costume and voice and mannerism.

The cast of The 39 Steps

The entire cast is having so much fun you might find yourself forgetting what is going on with the story. It doesn’t really matter, and the plot’s flights of fancy are abetted by a number of references to Hitchcock films for the attentive. I have to say though that the production I saw in London’s West End in 2015 seemed more verbally inventive, but that might be the effect of familiarity.

MTC’s version of this screwball caper comedy brings together two of its top comic actors—Schilling, who has played many roles, and Densky, last seen as the irritable department store elf in The Santaland Diaries—with Lindemann and Cable, two other comic talents who work very well together, to provide an evening of inspired silliness with pretty much a gag a minute. Seeing these quick-timed switches in such close proximity to an audience makes for a certain awe at what they get away with.

The 39 Steps
Adapted by Patrick Barlow
From the novel by John Buchan
From the movie by Alfred Hitchcock
Directed by Pamela Hill

Costume Design: Diane Vanderkroef; Wigs: Peggy de la Cruz; Set Design: Jordan Janota; Lighting Design: Michael Blagys; Sound Design: Monet Fleming; Stage Manager: Gary Betsworth

Cast: Laura Cable, Matt Densky, Gary Lindemann, Jim Schilling

Music Theatre of Connecticut
March 2-18, 2018

Window Watcher

Review of Rear Window at Hartford Stage

Darko Tresnjak’s production of Rear Window, adapted by Keith Reddin from the Cornell Woolrich story, “It Had to Be Murder,” that inspired the famous Hitchcock film, creates, on the one hand, a visually interesting “stage noir” take on the story, and, on the other, adds levels of complication that make for a confused approach to characters and content.

Some of the problem, of course, may be in the eye of the beholder. If you come to the show informed by the film, you may be expecting the play’s big-draw film star, Kevin Bacon, to be playing Jeffries as a take on the affable Everyman made so indelible by James Stewart. The Jeffries in Reddin’s script, based a bit on Woolrich himself, is deliberately not that. Jeffries is an alcoholic newsman brooding over at least two major issues: one is the loss of his wife, Gloria, in a vague backstory, the other is a certain disillusion caused by the conviction and execution of an innocent black youth in South Carolina, a story he covered. Typically, Jeffries likes to write about homicide, and to purloin the murder weapon when possible, but the racist handling of the case of George Stinney (which actually occurred) has given him pause, professionally speaking.

McKinley Belcher III (Sam), Kevin Bacon (Hal Jeffries)

He’s also on pause because, like the main character in both story and film, he has a cast on his leg, and crutches, and a wheelchair. All of which gives Bacon something to do, physically, in moving about the stage and making the most of a world-weary, hang-dog manner. But if you’re hoping for a good, middle-aged female nurse role such as Stella, brought to life by Thelma Ritter in Hitchcock’s film (scripted by John Michael Hayes), forget it. The helper for Jeffries is a young black kid, Sam (McKinley Belcher III) who shows up saying Jeffries, one drunken night, invited him over. He also has nothing but wide-eyed praise for Jeffries the writer; Jeffries looks askance at the flattery but takes a liking to the kid anyway. All well and good, except that Sam, a cipher of a character, also has to take on the role of getting Jeffries evidence—in the film, that task is left to his swanky girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) and in the story to Sam, a servant of long-standing. Here, the strongest character reading of these two is as a folie à deux between newsman turned sleuth and adoring fan turned factotum; there are also a few hints of Jeffries being in the closet, but those aren’t developed any more than that wan recollection of a former wife.

Kevin Bacon as Hal Jeffries

And the lack of development on the level of Jeffries’ emotional life nags at the play and isn’t really compensated for by Jeffries’ activity. What Jeffries does, of course, is spy on his neighbors. Though they aren’t up to much other than offering window-dressing, there is an ensemble up there in a tenement-like set, complete with fire escape, able to turn when necessary to let us into the modest apartment of the Thorwalds (Robert Stanton and Melinda Page Hamilton), a couple at loggerheads that Jeffries becomes obsessed with. There’s a glimpse of where this might have gone, were we still living in the Freudian days that fueled elements in film noir and Hitchcock, when we see that the couple might be living out some version of Jeffries’ own marital woe (particularly as Hamilton plays both the former Mrs. Jeffries and the current Mrs. Thorwald, that is, until the latter disappears mysteriously). The psychological battle Jeffries might undergo in confronting why he believes Thorwald—a meek-enough-looking guy, seeming like the quintessential hen-pecked husband complete with effeminate apron when we first meet him—killed Mrs. Thorwald could be the lurid stuff of a melodrama of the 1950s or 1960s (cue Nicholas Ray).

But that’s not what we have here, seemingly. Or that’s at least—without giving it away—what we’re led to believe by the rather rushed and unconvincing denouement that comes about, complete with loud gunplay, before the fuzzy conclusion. Along the way, there’s John Bedford Lloyd as Boyne, a surly detective that Jeffries himself calls into action, as he does in the story, though in Woolrich sans the racism that seems present here to remind us that cops, in New York (not just down South), have been known to mistreat African-Americans. It’s a point that serves little purpose in this story of a house-bound, would-be sleuth going bonkers, but one must allow that it’s a point, at least. Nothing much else here has one.

Except, that is, for the manifest technical point that seems to be exercising director Tresnjak: can the stage take on the mood and feel of film noir and deliver similar entertainment? In terms of the use of Alexander Dodge’s amazing set, with York Kennedy’s rich lighting scheme, Jane Shaw’s powerhouse sound, and Sean Nieuwenhuis’ projections—including opening titles straight from a movie matinee and a pair of filmed eyes that Hitch, always a friend to kitschy effects, might use—Tresnjak creates a world that should be inhabited by characters from James M. Cain and the like, where murder will out and flawed heroes take their lumps. But this is no campy celebration of beloved effects of a bygone cinematic era. And as a dark night of the soul, the play is oddly soul-less, while the theme of murder, so dear to the noirish heart, is here a vague sub-plot among sub-plots, made all the more will-o’-the-wisp by the fact that the tenement set, as the Thorwalds’ container, leaps into view only when, as it were, Jeffries bothers “to turn on the set.”

Kevin Bacon (Jeffries), Robert Stanton and Melinda Page Hamilton (the Thorwalds)

And that might be the final irony of the staging of Rear Window. The film made the case that we all live, to some degree, in glass houses, created by our voyeuristic love of cinema and television. We look at one another as characters in a drama we’re trying to watch. The richly detailed set in the film recalled a stage set, but “off-stage” and “off-camera” are two different worlds, the one simply doesn’t exist, the other appeals to a range of imaginative possibilities. Staging the cinematic is a complicated business and Tresnjak’s Rear Window demonstrates the problems more than it solves them.

Rear Window
Adapted for the stage by Keith Reddin
Based on the story by Cornell Woolrich

Scenic Design: Alexander Dodge; Costume Design: Linda Cho; Lighting Design: York Kennedy; Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Projection Design: Sean Nieuwenhuis; Wig & Hair Design: Charles G. LaPointe; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Fight Choreographer: Steve Rankin; Casting: Jim Carnahan, C.S.A.; Production Stage Manager: James Harker; Assistant Stage Manager: Cherie B. Tay; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; Associate Artistic Director: Elizabeth Williamson

Cast: Kevin Bacon; McKinley Belcher III; Melinda Page Hamilton; John Bedford Lloyd; Robert Stanton; Erik Bloomquist; Caitlin Harrity; Dan Bender; Roy Donnelly; William Squier; Barbara Gallow; Ashley Croce; Jon Garrity; Quinn Warren; Dan Bender; Roy Donnelly

Hartford Stage
October 22-November 15, 2015

The Hotel Unheimlich

It was my daughter’s idea.  She had heard of the show from a friend and so had some idea what to expect.  Her experience was therefore more extensive than mine, it seems.  I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t see all I heard about from her, but at the same time our divergent experiences simply underlined a wonderful aspect of the show: the experience you have of it is largely determined by your own volition.  I could have stuck with her, went where she went, followed the actors she followed, but then I’m not her and I wanted my wandering through the dreamlike, nightmarish world of Sleep No More to be mine. Sleep No More is theater as performance art, as installation, as dance and mime, as full immersion experience, as a trip into the collective uncanny.  Developed by a group called Punch Drunk (aptly enough), the show first had a run in Boston and true cognoscenti are quick to say they saw it there (New Yorkers don’t get everything first), but, from what I’ve heard, the Boston show was not as extensive, didn’t take up, as it does in New York, four stories of a warehouse in Chelsea, reconfigured as the McKittrick hotel, a kind of living movie set you never emerge from until the show is over (or until you choose to leave).  After four hours inside, I was ready to go, I suppose, but that’s not to say I would’ve left any time soon.  Like a child at closing time at the carnival, one feels there must be one more thrill, one more odd sensation, one more unexpected event still to come.

If you haven’t heard about it (or have), here are some facts you’re likely to hear: the audience is free to roam wherever they wish through the four floors but must wear the provided masks and maintain silence; these restrictions prevent audience intrusion into the spectacle—if a member of the cast wants you to interact, he or she will involve you—but they also create a side spectacle of roving, masked and silent watchers (or voyeurs, to make it sound as creepy as it sometimes feels) who are your doubles or comrades, and in their company one feels part of a collectivity less like a theater audience and more like a scavenger hunt or like “free time” on an unguided tour of the Twilight Zone.

About the show itself: it dramatizes, in somewhat free associative dumbshow, the story of Macbeth—which means there’s death and blood and satanic rites—combined with elements extracted from Alfred Hitchcock’s noirish version of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel Rebecca, and other elements that, as best my daughter and I could piece it together, had to do with murder in a hotel and a stint in an insane asylum.  It would be easier to parse the action if, say, the different threads were self-contained on one floor or another, so that the audience could peek in or pass through, “story-surfing” amongst the floors.  But it doesn’t work that way.  Actors pass you on their way to or from a scene and you can choose to follow or not.  Maybe you’d rather keep looking at the fascinating set of an apothecary’s store, or a post office filled with hand-written messages, or a taxidermy shop, or the graveyard, or the grand ballroom where you may move amidst a moving grove.

I found it hard to fix on characters per se, to say nothing of performances.  It gets underway in the ball room where all the characters are present for a dance and then go their different ways.  Who you find yourself following might be due to whim or to an effort to stick with Macbeth, say, or, as I did, because you saw one woman drink drugged milk and wanted to see what would happen to her next.  If you’ve ever dreamed of not being bound by linearity, this is the show for you.  What you “learn” is largely dependent on what kind of sleuth you are, what kind of things you notice, what your imagination, once aroused, does to you.

If you’ve ever sat through a performance where you found yourself not too engaged by who was on stage and wondered what the other characters, off stage, were up to, it’s liberating, here, to know you can go wander in search of them.  Someone is up to something somewhere, so seek and ye shall find.  And whatever you find seems somehow intended for you, if only because you led yourself there.  That’s the dramatic element that I found most haunting and inspiring: the feeling of being implicated in what I saw because I stayed and watched it, or because I trailed someone to see what they were going to do.  The only comparable experience is a dream where you seem to be doing something for your own reasons and yet have no control over what happens.

The other aspect that stayed with me and wouldn’t let go is amazement at the design elements, the lighting, the smells, the sounds, the full sensory experience that creates a range of reactions—some rooms you just want to get out of, others you could imagine hanging out in if you were a member of the Addams family, others might feel, oddly, like a place you’ve been before and may find yourself in again—like returning to Manderley, or to the witches’ den—led by a shuddering sense of repetition compulsion.

When we attended, back in April, the show was slated to close in the first week of June.  Now it’s the end of July and the show is slated to close on Labor Day weekend.  I suppose it will close, but the longer the show lasts, the more people hear about it and want to see it, and those who have already been want to go again.  I have to admit I’m wondering if I can manage to work in another visit before the end.  Maybe I’ll see my earlier self wandering amongst the onlookers, a remnant of myself that never left, like Nell at the end of The Haunting of Hill House.

“Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house.”

http://sleepnomorenyc.com/