Actors, stagecraft help ‘Midnight’ shine
Thrillers, if performed well, can be scarier on stage than on screen.
And the Spokane Civic Theatre has performed the thriller “I’ll Be Back Before Midnight” quite well indeed.
This oft-produced Peter Colley play is an artfully contrived tale of murder, madness and ghosts. It contains many elements that would seem like dreadful clichés in a Hollywood horror flick – rumbling lightning, billowing curtains and a crazy old hick named George. Yet on stage, they seem more real, more immediate and yes, more scary.
This production, directed by Wes Deitrick, creates some startling moments with the help of some good stagecraft. Little pools of blood materialize, as if by some satanic force, on the drawing room floor. Dead bodies swing wildly in the stairwell. Bizarre thumping noises echo eerily throughout the auditorium.
The entire play takes place in a big, old rural farmhouse, lovingly re-created by scene designer Peter Hardie. The place is filled with ominous nooks and crannies, not to mention gun cases, mounted birds and stone hatchets.
Yet many of the chills are of a psychological variety, given life by a four-person cast. Dave Rideout and Angie Dierdorff Petro play Greg and Jan Sanderson, a young couple who have taken the house as a kind of rural retreat. Jan has just been released from a mental ward and is barely on the edge of stable. Greg is an uncommunicative – and just plain weird – archaeologist.
Both Rideout and Petro seem a bit tentative in the first act, yet this turns out to be part of the dynamic of the play. In the second act, when it becomes more clear who they are, and what kind of bizarre motives they have, they come into their own.
Ron Ford takes an obvious comic pleasure in playing the piggish and lecherous old farmer, George. One minute, he’s the jolly and innocent rustic. The next minute, he’s nuzzling Jan and grabbing what he can.
The cast standout is Heather Swanstrom as the treacherous Laura Sanderson. Swanstrom commanded attention from her first entrance, in knee-high boots, fishnet stockings and jet-black flapper-style bob.
She created a forceful and utterly despicable character in Laura, a woman clearly trying to pull a “Gaslight” number on poor confused Jan. She sashayed around the room, making sharp and demeaning cracks about Jan’s “imbecility,” while at the same time treating Greg not at all the way a sister would treat a brother.
We in the audience get the message loud and clear: There are some serious psychological undercurrents at work in this unhappy little threesome. But we don’t find out until the end exactly what they are.
A few elements can stand some tightening. The time between scenes lasted too long. One particularly long interlude was accompanied by a little too much of the song “Dazed and Confused.” The cast, too, could pick up their cues a bit faster.
However, “I’ll Be Back Before Midnight” delivers what it’s supposed to deliver: a few good shivers and a thoroughly entertaining evening of theater.
I won’t go into too much detail, because I don’t want to ruin the surprises. Just remember the old theatrical adage that says that a gun displayed in the first act must go off in the second.
The same principle applies to prehistoric weapons as well.