His second wife is missing...
AND NOW HE HAS A GIRLFRIEND...
I enjoyed this production. The script (fact-based, but we’ll get to that later) was like Special Victims Unit meets Jodi Picoult, provided moments of starting poetry & insight, and created characters that provided the 360 degrees of reaction to a central conflict. The set was forgettable & the costumes were fine. I did like the idea of costuming entirely in grayscale shades to accentuate the shadowy shades of truth.
Kristin Collins played Laura Bakersfield, our leading lady & central protagonist. She was just great in her multi-faceted performance as an authentically contemporary broad, a hopeful/hopeless romantic, & an endearing individual. In the role of our antagonist & title character, Jason Huysman could have played a bolder Walter Dante; he lacked a positive or negative charge, so seemed annoyingly neutral in his role of the possible serial killer. He was sufficient, but sufficiency does not quite suffice in such a complicated & central role. Brigitte Ditmars & Michael Boone played Suzanne & Harper Liff, Laura’s best friend & her husband. She was GREAT; he was good. As a couple, their conversation was infused with a familiar intimacy. As individuals, she seemed more at home in her role whereas he seemed like he was acting a little too much.
Scott Allen Luke played Sam Brunner, Laura’s ex-husband who still felt a sense of protectiveness over her. His performance was adequate but lacked a certain punch & authenticity. Antoine Pierre played Whitfield Russell Gibbs, the cop actively pursuing Walter Dante. He provided strong punctuating moments & I wish he’d had more stage time. Stacie Barra played Ellen, the active & present ghost of Walter’s first wife who drowned in their pool. Her role was a strange & complicated character (the ghost of a woman who doesn’t know how she was murdered & can’t shake the hold the living commit upon her). She grew on me because she was so strongly committed to her character & created a character that was striking & 3-D, despite being a ghost. She created a woman I could have envisioned alive. I wish she her costume & styling were more striking manner, but her acting & interpretation were dead-on [pun intended].
The Elephant in the Theatre
The minimalist program desperately needed a note from the playwright or director. Chicago-based playwright Jon Steinhagen unabashedly used local non-fiction news as an inspiration for his recent Blizzard ‘67. The inspiration for this script should have been as equally openly-acknowledged. Maybe the facts behind the fiction were swept under the rug because the inspiration is contemporary & the victims‘ families are still in the thick of things; maybe because the inspiration was based on horrific crimes rather than an event naturally/organically; maybe it was a thoughtless oversight by the director. Even if the inspiration is if-y, facts are facts & paying audience members deserve as much knowledge as a theatre can share, which is why…THIS PRODUCTION NEEDED A DRAMATURGE.
Dramaturgy is an emerging field & new necessity for theatres in the post-9/11 world where audiences are smarter & need facts behind the fiction. Their primary role is to provide research & reference to enrich the experience/production for the actors, production staff, & audience. During the summer of 2005, I interned in Dramaturgy at Philadelphia Theatre Company. The play was The Beauty Inside by Catherine Filloux & the production opened in conjunction with NYC’s New Georges’ Theatre. The play centered on a 13-year-old Turkish girl who survived an honor killing & the American lawyer who takes on her case, despite the fact that the girl sides with the family that tried to kill her. My research included interviews with honor killing survivors, activists working with the U.N., imagery of contemporary Turkey for the design teams, & script stuff (dialect/definition/vernacular). This information was integral to the production because the production staff was so wholly committed to respecting & representing the authenticity of the world within the script.
As a non-native to Chicago & someone who was not wholly familiar on the Peterson case prior to seeing the show, my experience as an audience member would have improved exponentially from the infusion of the dramaturge’s efforts. I love research-based scripts & wish I had gone into the theatre knowing that’s what I was seeing. A dramaturge’s research would have helped the actors infinitely as well (I’m envisioning the psychology, knowledge on the actual aftermath in the community, & research on the people who lived in that community).
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