Stageloft is Back with Spooky ‘Black’By Paul Kolas Telegram and Gazette Reviewer STURBRIDGE— Stageloft Repertory Theater isn’t waiting until Halloween to chill you with a goose-bumpingly effective ghost story. Adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, “The Woman in Black” is drenched in a fog-shrouded dread that puts the grizzly blood-splattered excess of Internet-age horror films to shame. As Saturday night’s impeccably acted and technically jarring production demonstrated, there is nothing more unsettling or potent than the power of imagination. The opening moments of the play may seem a bit disorienting: why is one man reading awkwardly from a manuscript while another is continually interrupting him with entreaties to inflect with more natural conviction and emotion? Are they rehearsing for a play? It soon becomes apparent that the reader is one Arthur Kipps, a solicitor haunted by nightmares who is bargaining on an actor’s expertise to exorcize him of his demons. Kipps feels only by vicariously replicating his harrowing experiences can he cathartically be rid of them. The two men exchange roles on a Victorian theater stage, the actor assuming the character of Kipps, and Kipps playing several characters from the isolated marshland village of Cryhthin Gifford, where many years ago Kipps was sent to attend the funeral of one of his law firm’s clients, Alice Drablow, and settle her affairs by going through her personal papers. As he learns more about Drablow, so do we. Mallatratt’s clever contraption is thus a story within a story. It gives nothing away to say there is a ghost involved, and whether it is real or imagined becomes fairly evident well before the final curtain. As the lines blur between the stage setting and the re-enacted story, the specter of a black-hooded and chalk-faced woman periodically glides around the stage, creating a palpable feeling of foreboding. Director Edward Cornely and his diabolically inventive lighting and sound tech, Josh Minor, use all manner of gimmicks to maximize the chill factor. Fog curls around the characters at key moments of anticipation, a female scream pierces the night gloom, horse hooves clop through the damp marsh air. Particularly striking is the illumination of a bedroom in the Drablow mansion, showing a rocking chair rocking on its own. Even the well worn cliché of a creaking door opening somehow seems fresh here. Visually, using minimal props, it’s a production rich in mood and atmosphere, suggestively conjuring an isolated town soaked in mist, a spooky graveyard, and townspeople harboring fearful secrets. And it is to the great credit of Doug Ingalls (The Actor) and Mark Patrick (Arthur Kipps) that they make such a talky recounting of past events so gripping and involving. It’s a treat to observe two consummate actors handle the tricky feat of telling a story and making us feel a part of it. Ingalls immerses himself in the “role” of the younger Kipps so persuasively, one feels he’s become the character, and when one considers the outcome of this eerie tale, maybe his “acting” skills have done him a terrible disservice. Patrick does a marvelous job of both providing a narrative thread to Kipps’ story and juggling a host of secondary portraits of the village citizens with colorfully varied accents. What a “quick study” of an actor Kipps is after those first line readings. As Ingalls keeps encouraging him several times, “I’ll make an Irving of you yet” (a reference to a renowned actor of Victorian times), and indeed he does. Or does he? Has Kipps been playing The Actor all along to rid a curse? Thanks to such speculative ambiguities, two exceptional performances, and the wafting and disquieting visage of Christine Creelman as a rather otherworldly being, you may or may not believe in ghosts, but you will most likely believe your time has been well spent. |