Watching mystery masterpiece Wait Until Dark snowball toward its fright-fraught finale, you feel your body reacting involuntarily, psychological endurance pushed to the brink, brain overtaken by impulse, until you at last throw off inhibitions, surrender to the sensation and suddenly, surprisingly, uncontrollably ... nod off.
You can shake yourself awake, but why bother? Nevada Conservatory Theatre's latest is a ham-handed, overacted, under-directed botch of Frederick Knott's tightly knotted thriller, a sorry wrap-up to an otherwise sterling season.
The play, a 1966 Broadway hit with Robert Duvall and Lee Remick (later a 1967 film and 1982 teleflick), revolves around a heroin-filled doll that, through a series of circumstances, winds up in the Greenwich Village apartment of Susy Hendrix (Samantha Kristine Roy), a blind woman who finds herself the target of a scam by three creeps who terrorize her to retrieve it—and discover Susy isn't as helpless as they expected.
Knott's script, a twisty treat of false identities, concealed motives, hairpin plot turns and abject terror, has a simple goal: scare you silly. But NCT's take is fake, a plastic approximation of a genuine thriller that Glenn Casale directs in a flat, formulaic drone, actorly hysteria and posturing subbing for authentic suspense, action choreographed in a frenzy less Hitchcockian than Three-Stooge-ian.
As primo baddie Harry Roat Jr., who should throb with mysterious menace that pushes the play toward a terrifying face-off, Sean Boyd is a bland cutout of criminality. Portraying one of the thugs who poses as a friend of Susy's absent husband to gain her trust, Robert Daymond Howard gets significant stage time but his performance quickly accelerates from zero to hyper-acting and stays there.
Ultimately undercutting Wait Until Dark, however, is Roy in the role that should serve as the vulnerable surrogate for our own insecurities. But as Susy, Roy is one-note shrill in a performance made more of artifice than emotion. (I'm fairly certain Knott didn't intend for us to root for the hoods to off her just to keep her pie hole shut. Doesn't anyone in this production believe in the power of the dramatic pause?)
Irritating and unconvincing as a blind woman, Roy's subtlety-free physical portrait—all sliding, spinning and stumbling, just in case we forget she's blind—summoned for me an unfortunate parallel I couldn't quite identify until, after countless hambone, duck-like lunges across the stage in a half-crouch, it came to me:
Groucho. Minus the mustache.
No surprise, then, that what should be a climactic, white-knuckle confrontation played out in near-total darkness on stage devolves into a chaotic symphony of clumsiness.
Accentuating the absurdity was melodramatic "thriller" music blasted through loudspeakers framing each act, as if a skeletal Lon Chaney was somewhere in the house, bony fingers pounding the organ keys a la Phantom of the Opera. However, Wait Until Dark is redeemed, at least in a token way, by John Iacovelli's basement-apartment set, a joy to absorb in all its minute detail.
But after arriving home, rather than feeling thrillingly entertained, I had an odd urge to shoot an elephant in my pajamas.
(Remove cigar and say: "How it got in my pajamas, I'll never know.")