Lifeline
Theatre's newest
literary adaptation, "Gaudy Night" is a swiftly moving,
mesmerizing, and romantic piece involving threats and sabotage amidst bluestockings
and Latin quotations in 1935 Oxford. According to program notes, France
Limoncelli's
adaptation is the third Sayers piece to receive this Lifeline page to stage
treatment since 2002. As a recent import to Chicago, I was not here to see the
prior productions, but if they had any of the class of this one, my regret is
deep.
This
play takes place in and around the grounds and buildings of Oxford University
at the relatively newly established (and fictitious) women's Shrewsbury
College. Members of the class of 1920 have convened for a reunion (or
"gaudy") in 1935. Harriet Vane ( Jenifer Tyler) is a member of the reunion
class and a mystery writer with a past - once acquittal of murder and with a
long term bemused entanglement with Lord Peter Wimsey (Peter Greenberg). Harriet soon finds herself
amidst a series of mysterious acts ("poison pen" notes, fires,
graffiti, and other pranks) that the women of the college request her to solve.
The women resist police involvement as they feel their very existence on the
campus and their right to work as scholars is still tenuous. And the game is
on. Mysteries are solved by play's end and small worlds and wounds are set to
rights, as is required of stories of this "well made" school, and the
police are finally summoned. But much more is going on with this play providing
its main pleasures and provocations.
The
2006 sensibility approaching this strongly female and early feminist material
could find fault with the plot devices and developments. Harriet Vane is an
graduate of Oxford as is Lord Peter, and Harriet is the one who has been asked
to solve the mysterious serious of break-ins and acts of destruction and
threatening notes received by the circle of woman scholars. And yet, several of
the college women resent Harriet while fawning over Lord Peter when he visits,
especially the fabulously crimped Miss Hillyard (Mary O'Dowd), and Harriet herself struggles
with the mysteries and with the larger questions as they pertain to her own
life. In fact, her struggle with these questions on a personal level may cloud
her professional analytic abilities. Does she want conventional marriage or the
cloistered life of the mind? The "solutions" to the problems of the
play (and I will provide no spoilers here) come only when Lord Peter returns to
town and assesses the situation. And yet, we must keep in mind that these
characters were written in 1935, and much as Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora
Charles first created in 1934's novel The Thin Man, Harriet and Peter are by action
and by intellect and by loving banter fully partners throughout the play,
despite his "lead" in providing ultimate plot resolutions. It remains
only for Harriet to find her own peace with a decision about Lord Peter's
repeated marriage proposals that provides the curtain line.
Looming
war in Europe provides context for action of the play. Lord Peter repeatedly
travels off for unspecified work for the Foreign Office in Rome, Paris, and
Warsaw. [We are told of these activities and the reasons for them by a conveniently
present, amusing and yet otherwise potentially superfluous character Saint
George (amusingly played by Bradford R. Lund, Lord Peters nephew and an
Oxford undergraduate.] We understand Lord Peter's activities now 70 years later
in the context of growing fascism in those very cities he has been visiting and
know that the political unrest there will be leading to World War II. Upon his
return from these adventures to check in with his gal Harriet and their long
term reluctant relationship, these actions on a world stage provide a kind of
contrast and context for parochial machinations of a college malefactor.
Discussion of what Lord Peter has seen in his travels provides the characters
with the opportunity to analyze the role of principles in life, and how they
can lead one to combat and death. One character muses that "Suffering for
principles seems to be what principles are for somehow."
The
acting ensemble is tight and balanced providing elegant support to the two
leads. Regina Webster as Annie Wilson (understudy who went on at my performance) has a
light touch with the character of a tightly wired widowed staff member at the
college. Katie McLean doubled two roles well and distinctly. More senior members of the
college women were touchingly portrayed by four additional women, etching
distinct and funny and sympathetic characters: Jan Sodaro is Miss Lydgate, an English
tutor whose burned manuscript is an early act of sabotage; Melinda Moonahan's Dean Letita Martin provides
stiff decorum and reason amid the growing panic among her colleagues; Christina
Irwin as Miss
Devine etches a complete portrait of a visiting scholar who brings some baggage
with her to the college; and Mary O'Dowd's Miss Hillyard, already mentioned,
is a stiff and familiar version of a self-contained and principled member of
the cloistered intellectual set.
Director
Dorothy Milne creates
a complex world in a small space and utilizes every possible entrance and exit
in the theater's space. Jackie and Richard Penrod have created a beautiful and
flexible set. You know that you have become attuned to subtle set pieces when
the emergence of a rowboat elicits "oohs" from an audience. Sound by Victoria
Deioria is
lovely as usual and appropriately cinematic when necessary, moving smoothly
from the pomp of collegiate ceremonial events to chirping of birds and buzz of
insects evoking a world outside the college walls. Lighting and projections
designs by Kevin D. Gawley are striking and subtle in equal measure. Both the fight
choreographer (Geoff Coates) and dialect coach (Phil Timberlake) create dramatic movement and
accents from another culture that help to evoke Sayers' particular world. And
dramaturg Laronika Thomas's essential program notes and Latin translations assist
the viewer in enjoying some key nuances of the story.
This
production has already added performances during its limited run. Don't miss
this lovely romantic vision of a collegiate retreat in which stunningly modern
questions are asked amid mystery and suspicion. Its delicious.