Enigmatic ‘Scotland Road’ Holds Attention To End
“Scotland Road” Saturday, Feb. 1, Interplayers Ensemble
I would use the word “refreshing” to describe “Scotland Road,” except it seems like such an odd word to use for a play so enigmatic, so chilling and so strange.
Yet refreshing it is, because this Jeffrey Hatcher psychodrama is so different from the usual Interplayers fare. Instead of comparing it to Shaw or Gurney, I can only compare it to the “X-Files” by way of Samuel Beckett.
In the hands of director Michael Weaver, this was a play filled with sudden blackouts, ominous rumbling noises, and a set completely and blindingly white. Yet it also is a play of ideas, although it might require a yearlong master’s-degree seminar to figure out exactly what those ideas are.
For the record, I will stipulate that I do not know exactly what “Scotland Road” was about. But I will also say that at various times I thought I knew what it was about, only to have my assumptions dashed. I did not find this annoying; I found it provocative.
The play starts with an intriguing premise. A woman has been found sitting on an iceberg, in 1912 dress, by a Norwegian fishing trawler in the 1990s. When she is picked up, she says only one one word: “Titanic.”
We see the woman (Erin Merritt) sitting in a stark, white, locked room, being interrogated by an intense young man named John (John Bogar) and a Dr. Halbrech (Ellen Lawson). During the first act, I found myself pleasurably anticipating the gradual unraveling of a mystery.
However, the mystery did not unravel. It became denser and more tangled. When the woman finally speaks, we don’t learn any simple solution to her sudden appearance. She was not plucked off the Titanic by aliens and planted back on an iceberg 80 years later. The truth - whatever it is - is not so pat.
We are kept riveted by this maddeningly elusive tale for its entire length (less than two hours) with consistently strong acting by this four-person cast. Bogar is intensely strange as John, a man who has an almost frightening obsession with the Titanic. He is the descendent of John Jacob Astor, the aristocrat who died on the Titanic. Or is he?
Lawson is equally effective as Halbrech, a doctor who is treating the woman. Or is she?
Erin Merritt, as the woman, spends the first half of the play mute, pleading with her eyes, scolding with her eyes, accusing with her eyes. When she finally does speak, Merritt reveals her to be an intelligent young Welsh woman with something sly and possibly even devious under the surface.
Gail Smith Reynolds is fine as Frances Kittle, an elderly woman who comes out of hiding to confront the woman. This woman is the only living survivor of the Titanic. Or is she?
Weaver gives the entire play a heart-pounding tension, partly through lighting and sound. The lights don’t fade up or down; they flash on, they flash off with a startling suddenness. And whenever the lights go dark, they are accompanied by an ominous rumbling noise that could be either the pounding of the engines below-deck on the Titanic, or the deafening sound of the pulse in your own head.
“Scotland Road” may be about a lot of things. It may be about how people are rarely who they appear to be. Virtually everybody in this play is posing as somebody or something they are not. This is clearly one of Hatcher’s themes; what is unclear is what point he is making.
It may be about mental illness - the white room being a mental ward, and we, the audience, locked in it, inside somebody’s obsessive and overactive mind. In a way, that is the feeling I take away from this.
Or it may be about a woman who is abducted by aliens and planted on an iceberg. We might as well leave our options open.
I can tell you what “Scotland Road” is not. It is not a mystery. Don’t expect a detective or a solution.
It most definitely is a psychodrama, and an uncommonly compelling psychodrama at that.
, DataTimes