Peter Bergman Theater Reviews

"Dial M for Murder" by Frederick Knott. Directed by Flo Hayle. At the Ghent Playhouse in Ghent, N.Y.

Margot Wendice believes she knows and understands her still youthful, tennis-playing, center-stage-addicted husband, Tony. She would defend him to the ends of the earth. She would even do this to Max Halliday, the young American man she loves as dearly as she once loved her husband. In Frederick Knott's play "Dial M For Murder" -- a true classic -- everyone has a motive for bringing a murder case to its conclusion, and no one more so than police Inspector Hubbard, who has seen the case through from investigation to death sentence. The true crime in this play is not the murder itself, nor the intended crime that is aborted; it is the deliberate obfuscation of the deepest motive of all: the need to be appreciated.
On stage now at the Ghent Playhouse, Knott's mystery hit (it played 552 performances in its initial Broadway run, inspired a Hitchcock film and has been restaged and refilmed more than two dozen times) is opening their 2011-12 season. Having seen the play just a few months ago at the Dorset Playhouse in Vermont with a brilliant cast and a director who brought new insights out of the script, it is difficult to see it again so soon and with a company of community players -- whose work I generally like -- doing somewhat less than the summer's professional company brought to their roles. This was inevitable.
Still, the show on stage in Ghent is engaging and endearing and the workings of a good script are still in evidence. For an audience that has never seen the play on stage, this is a well-wrought introduction the work. I feel somewhat out on a limb with someone just out of reach slowly but inexorably sawing my branch off the trunk. I will proceed to tell you what I saw, but that observation will obviously be colored.

Let me start with Max, the American TV mystery writer, played here by the talented Paul Murphy. Tall, big-haired, bass-baritone Richard Derr played the part originally in New York and the film presented Robert Cummings as the romantic leading man. Murphy and Cummings have something in common here: Neither one succeeds in making the character believable and for the exact same reasons. Max's dialogue is strained and hard to take in the first act. He, a "typical" American of the 1950s, is not given a credible sensibility by the British author. As written his ego far outweighs his ability to express it. He messes up reality by overplaying his hand for Margot and both these actors fall into that trap. Making Max believable and likeable is the hardest task in this show, and Murphy does much better in the final scenes of the play than he does anywhere else and Cummings was in exactly that same position. Neither man has the physical charisma of Derr and it may have been that romantic impression that saved the actor in the role way back in 1952. Murphy, who has charm, doesn't physically bring that sensibility to the stage this time.
Jill Wanderman pulls Margot out of her British hat by ignoring the rigors of a recognizable accent and playing the role "American." She has a lovely voice that tends to be shrill when she plays anger or anxiety. She is not the romantic figure of a girl that Grace Kelly was and not even the exotic soul of the younger Gusti Huber. Instead she presents a wife in mid-marriage who has given glamor a break and taken on an upper middle-class appearance enhanced by the odd costumes designed by Lisa Baumbach. Wanderman's dresses don't seem to fit either her body or her character. There is no flow to them, nor to her nightdress. They only emphasize her plains, and not her sensuality. Her performance has moments of absolute sheen but those are surrounded by periods of utter commonality. She makes you wonder why Max has fallen for her, why Tony is jealous.
Tony (Maurice Evans on Broadway; Ray Milland in the movie) is played with a rigorous American fervor by Daniel Region. Like Murphy he seems to strain against the dialogue at times, although he does better throughout the play. He delivers no English accent, has no mannerisms that separate him from his American rival. He is believable, however, as a plotting scoundrel with an emotionless soul. He gives a Tony whose motives seem immediate and accessible, whose technique is solid and as well developed as his tennis backhand serve. Region is intriguing to watch. He is handsome and attractive for a moment, then moderately repulsive as his body and his face contort awkwardly. He lets his Tony struggle with this odd, Dickensian trait. As often as possible he plays against the scripts words and in the third act he adds a laughing persona that allows him to play out Tonys fantasy of controlling his world easily and without fear.
John Trainor brings a remarkably realistic British sensibility and accent to his performance of the police inspector. His years of experience in murder mysteries has given him a self-assurance in these roles that clearly shows in this play. Under Flo Hayle's directio,n he seems to be rushing through a few things that he would normally take slowly and deliberately and now and then he seemed to be fighting the directors need to move on. But even that helped to give his character edge and fire.
Neal Berntson does a nice job as Captain Lesgate, the reprobate who is caught in Tony Wendices murderous trap. He knows how to make sleazy acceptable and how to make pseudo-respectability into an uncomfortable box ripping at its seams. Paul Leyden makes his first exit as Thompson a memorable moment. Someone does nicely with voices.
Hayle's direction of the play includes a brief but highly effective choreographed murder, some devilishly tricky acrobatics on furniture, and a few less defined visuals that seem to be the result of not wanting to imitate the work of others. Unfortunately those are the moments we wait for: the shaft of light from the bedroom door; the staircase discovery; the telling looks between Margot and Max. The play suffers from a lack of these things. On the other side, she has given her Margot a reality that is hard to come by, has strengthened Lesgate's dignity, and taken a few new and interesting turns with the unrepentant Tony.
On balance, this production cannot compare with the one I saw in Vermont in July but it does factor favorably against the Hitchcock film. Tony's sense of humor is better here. Margot's near breakdown is broader and more realistic. Maxs realization of the plot is presented with greater simplicity and honesty on this stage. This will never be my favorite production of the play, but it is one that adds much to the long history of a very good play and that makes it worth the time and money. And a good play is always worth revisiting.
 
"Dial M For Murder" plays at the Ghent Playhouse, located just off Route 66 in Ghent, N.Y., through Oct. 30. For tickets and information, contact the box office at 518-392-6264.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 8:33 PM | Permalink

"Night and Her Stars" by Richard Greenberg. Directed by Eric Peterson. At Oldcastle Theatre Company in Bennington, Vt.

How many men does it take to make a really good man? Start with intelligence, stir in intellect, add a bit of humility and a nattering of morality, throw in a pinch of humanity and heat up with handsome features, a good body and eloquent hair, and what do you have? The impossible dream, it would seem. In the 1950s, all of these elements existed, split among a dozen men who appeared as often as possible on televisions quiz shows. Some, like Herb Stempel, were unattractive savants with miserable lives but transforming brains, men who could remember everything and sort it out quickly from those steel trap brains of theirs. Others, like Charles Van Doren, could channel Don Juan, ignite cigarettes with only their smiles and still spout poetry and history and solve math problems with transcendent grace.
When the game show "Twenty-One" pitted these men against one another, sparks lit up the airwaves and the pulse of the nation speeded up for a while. But then it all changed. Stempel lost his agonizing attraction and Van Doren became a morning pedant. These two, who had combined passion and intelligence, charm and a touch of madness, almost made that historic single person in the minds and hearts of the American public. But when scandal broke around these shows and their own participation became a question mark in the press and in Congress, the world we knew changed drastically. So did the players.
Richard Greenberg's play "Night and Her Stars" deals with this situation. Never a playwright to avoid problems, the author of "Take Me Out," "The Velvet Hour," "Three Days of Rain" and "Eastern Standard" sets his sights on the conflicts within Stempel and Van Doren as well as the conflict between them that sparked so much of the trouble. In its current production at the Oldcastle Theatre Company's soon-to-be-lost home space in Bennington, Vt., an odd thing has happened to the play itself. Director Eric Peterson has created around an extraordinary cast a new problem -- focusing the play.

From the final scene's sentimental look at lost idealism, we should be clearly dealing with the sadness and the destruction of Charles Van Doren, and the play should be giving us the costs of fame and fortune when a wholesome scholar betrays his background to become a media darling. However, through the performance of the actor playing Herb Stempel, the play has been transformed into a single-thread irony concerned with the valueless appropriation of a genius savant with personality disorders. This, and the strength it achieves in the superb performance by Matt Malloy as Stempel, throws the play into a careless careening imbalance. And somehow, that's just fine. As the characters are caught off-balance, so is the audience. Greenberg in the hands of Peterson has created something to talk about!
Peterson's entire cast takes on the play with verve and drive and a deep understanding of the flaws and the power each character is endowed with by the author. TV producer Dan Enright, who sometimes narrates the story unnecessarily, is played with weird mental lapses by Bill Tatum. If the character is written that way, it is a disconcerting technique. If the character is being played that way because Tatum doesn't have his lines down pat, it is upsetting. Either way, the man emerges as a person of interest who is struggling with his story and his part in it. This is fascinating and it enlarges the character of Enright, making him less manipulative and more a flawed man trying to protect his interests at whatever cost. Tatum plays to that image and makes it work.
As his partner in TV and crime, Richard Howe gets to be very New York Jewish as Al Freedman. He handles this well and keeps the voice of reason going throughout the show. Ron Nagle, in multiple roles including TV host Dave Garroway, shows off his abilities to transform himself nicely. Peter DArcy Langstaff does a fine job as Jack Barry and also plays a congressional investigator with a shadowy hauteur that seemed just right for the man and the time.
Melissa McCloud Herion plays her multiple characters very nicely and manages to imbue each one with enough new character traits to keep herself out of the play and her characters primary. Sophia Garder makes a personal triumph out of Toby Stempel, the sad, damaged wife of Herb. She has the quiet moments of the play and she sounds her own trumpet deep within them, just enough brass to hold the center of attention but not so much triple-tongue technique that she steals a scene from Malloy as her husband.
Shawn J. Davis and Matt Malloy are Charles and Herb. I find it hard to talk about one and not the other here. Davis makes nervousness into a one-act play but Malloy makes the word manic solid and whole and expressive. While Davis defines his Charles through facial expressions and subtle body language that seems to keep him permanently immobile yet flexible and loose, Malloy uses his right hand and his face and his chest to create a bipolar person whose incessant babble is nothing short of explosively brilliant. Malloy can make chatter into cacophony for one voice. Davis takes the half sentence to new heights of expressivity. Both men have such specific syndromes that when they both speak simultaneously late in the play it is as though that single man was being created in front of us; their individual traits disappear for a moment and a new personality emerges.
Playing Mark Van Doren, Charles' father, and a few insubstantial others, is Oldcastle regular Carleton Carpenter. Without him the final scene, the plays announced "coda," would be sad, but with him on a bench with Davis playing his son there is that transcendent miracle that the theater can provide: a scene so real and so human that the impulse to reach out and embrace both men is almost irresistible. In the film on this subject, Mark did not emerge as a very subtle, warm or human creature, but in the hands of the Abba-Dabba-Honeymoon actor the elder Van Doren is as close as we can come to the perfect man, the combination creature.
Kenneth Mooney's set and costumes work well for the play, and most of Keith Chapman's moody lighting does also. Eric Peterson has provided a delicate coda of his own to his 18-year residency in this theater (this is reportedly his final production there) and it's not one to miss.

"Night and Her Stars" plays at the Bennington Center for the Arts, Route 9 at Gypsy Lane in Bennington, Vt., through Oct. 9. For information and tickets, call the box office at 802-447-0564.

Posted by Rebecca Dravis at 9:40 AM | Permalink