I usually very much
dislike even top-of-the-plot spoilers, but just to give this context: Mr.
Neary’s play is set on a contemporary Halloween. Late 60ish-early 70ish Johnny
Moynihan (Gordon Clapp, as
vigorously engaging a persona as he was playing N.Y.P.D Blues’ Greg Medavoy over 12 seasons that crossed over into
the new millennium) is answering the door with candy for the kids as he awaits
the arrival of his grown daughter. When Claire (Jenni Putney, the soul of Irish-American Eastern Massachusetts)
finally arrives and Johnny practically browbeats her into just sitting down to listen before heading upstairs, he haltingly
confesses that he has just used a pillow to suffocate his Alzheimer’s-ridden
wife in her sleep, after a particularly harrowing episode that left him without
hope. This is all done with such sincerity that you’re led to believe this will
be the sensitive dramatization of a delicate situation.
It turns out to be
something quite else, and it leaves you feeling cheated and a little bit lied
to (however unintentionally) by the playwright, and a lot by several of the characters. By which I don’t mean that
several of them aren’t keeping dark secrets (though they are, Johnny being
among them); but that we are introduced to them in an emotional context that
makes the plot revelation feel like a betrayal of our investment. (Anthony
Shaffer’s thriller Sleuth is of
course a very different sort of play, but it serves an an apt comparison,
because in Act One, when mystery novelist Andrew Wyke reveals his more sinister
hand to his offstage wife’s younger suitor, Milo Tindle, and in a mansion
setting that is practically a museum of game-play and murder-mystery weaponry,
it’s not a betrayal of the character we’ve met, it’s the other shoe dropping.)
Add to this a script with many needlessly redundant beats and direction (Carol Dunne) whose blocking is
sometimes chaotic, and whose sense of build doesn’t get much more nuanced than
loud vs. soft.
All this said, Neary
is a talented writer, and the cast (also including David Mason, Kathy
McCafferty, and Kathy Manfre) is
talented, so the experience is hardly dull or dishonorable. But it lacks the
kind of cohesion of conception and execution that would make it gratifying.
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