Dated 'Wait Until Dark' Needs More Spark

Dated 'Wait Until Dark' needs more spark

By ANNE SHARP
NEWS SPECIAL WRITER

REVIEW

During intermission at Thursday night’s opening of the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre’s production of “Wait Until Dark,” a man in the audience was overheard saying that he’d seen the play when it was originally on Broadway during the ’60s.

“And you can tell, it’s very much a ’60s play,” said the man, smiling, as if he were apologizing for a friend who always gets drunk at parties.

One of the problems with “Wait Until Dark” is that it is stuck in a mid-century limbo, between the artificial mechanics of the traditional, Agatha Christie-style suspense yam and the harsh shocks of a contemporary crime thriller.

It’s a scream the way playwright Frederick Knott set up every ungainly plot element in “Wait Until Dark” like a gigantic game of “Mousetrap.”

OK, here's the blind woman, stuck all alone in her apartment. Connect her with a doll stuffed with heroin. Connect the doll with a homicidal sadist and his two con-man flunkies, trying to retrieve the doll and have a little sick fun at the same time. Set up an old piece of rolled-up carpet...then put a pint of ammonia in the flower vase...

“Wait Until Dark” is basically just a dumb little bag of tricks, and it requires a certain sleight of hand to put it over on an audience. Unfortunately, this AACT production, directed by Fred Bock, isn’t deft enough to pull it off.

A likely reason the gentleman quoted at the beginning of this review was reminded of his first viewing of “Wait Until Dark” is that AACT’s staging is fairly conservative. Jeff Zupan’s set design is pretty much the standard low-rent, rundown, bohemian Greenwich Village basement apartment seen in the film version. (The rental property situation in Greenwich Village, incidentally, has changed somewhat since 1966.)

The actors play it mostly straightforward and low-key, which often comes off as sort of bland. J. Ricardo Hunt, as the murderous crook Harry Roat, Jr., doesn’t overdo the arch-fiend bit the way most actors are tempted to do, but unfortunately seems as about as sinister and intimidating as a cruller. He’s obviously not much of a threat to the blind woman Suzy (Susannah Conn), and their final dual of wits in the dark suffers from this lack of tension.

In fact, Suzy never really seems intimidated at all by the men who continually invade her home, pretending to be policemen, leaving dead bodies lying around, cutting out her phone line, threatening to set her on fire, and like that.

Rather than a desperate, confused woman trying to make sense out of a frightening situation, Suzy just seems like the world’s dumbest New Yorker. She doesn’t even loch her door, for crying out loud. She doesn’t even own a can of Mace!

Though the dumbness of a major character in this play is a flaw we all just have to live with, one rather serious technical problem with this production can be easily addressed “Wait Until Dark” is a very talky play, and unfortunately some of the cast have trouble making themselves heard -- either by not speaking clearly, or by addressing dialogue to the upstage wall, when the audience desperately wants to hear what’s going on.

Sing out, Louise!

AACT's production of "Wait Until Dark" continues at the University of Michigan's Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre through Saturday. Curtain times are 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday. For more information call 971-AACT.