REVIEWS ...
Monday, August 20, 2001
'Mindgame' challenges patience more than intellect
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Plays such as Sleuth, Wait Until Dark and Deathtrap become enduring theatrical staples for good reason. We love to be teased and intellectually taunted; we love it when a playwright draws us into a thriller, then surprises or startles the heck out of us.
The best writers of such plays make the "formula" seem easy when actually they're more difficult to construct than they seem. As a result, there are genuine thrillers and there are thriller-wannabes. Anthony Horowitz' Mindgame belongs with the latter.
A British play getting its American premiere at GableStage, Mindgame is set in the spacious yet curiously minimalist office of Dr. Alex Farquhar (Bob Rogerson), who runs an experimental hospital for the criminally insane.
Author Mark Styler (David Kwiat) has come to beg for a series of interviews with a patient named Easterman, one of England's more notorious serial killers -- a subset of madmen that Styler has already chronicled with great commercial success.
Given the "rules" of the genre, it's hardly a surprise that everything in Mindgame seems just a little bit off.
Styler is left waiting in Farquhar's office for two hours, only to have the doctor apologetically admit he has no recollection why the writer has come to call. Farquhar's nurse, Jane Plimpton (Lisa Morgan), is an oddly jittery woman who seems to know more about the contents of Farquhar's desk than the doctor does and who slips Styler a note when the doctor's back is turned.
An office entrance -- we have seen the doctor come through those doors -- suddenly seems to be a closet, albeit one that contains a straitjacket. Hmmm.
Yet for all its thoughtfully realized "surprises" -- director Joseph Adler and set designer Rich Simone make sure every little comic-creepy detail of Horowitz' script is properly underlined -- Mindgame really isn't the full-out, intellect-challenging pleasure it aims to be.
Its two major twists aren't tough to guess if you have any interest in anticipating the outcome of Styler's quest.
Such gory-comic thrillers allow for plenty of scenery-chewing from the actors, and the capable Rogerson, Kwiat and Morgan zestfully oblige. Too bad the company's talent wasn't utilized on a better play.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Monday, August 20, 2001
Mystery from England adds horror to formula
By Jack Zink, Theater Critic
Stage mysteries used to rely on the art of the threat, but that doesn't work any more. Forced to become horror stories -- grand guignol, even -- plays such as Mindgame taunt the audience with bloody showdowns and gasping victims.
That's because the guesswork went out of old formulas when plays like Deathtrap and Sleuth pushed them to the limit. It's been nearly 30 years and there's still no breakthrough, but rather than let the genre die, playwrights and directors adapted graphic horror from the movies. And when that's not enough, how about toying with reality itself?
Mindgame is the second recent London thriller to emigrate to Coral Gables. Although not quite the fantasy that Communicating Doors was at the Miracle Theatre, Mindgame also uses doors to change reality, and thus try to throw us off the trail. Anthony Horowitz's zinger is making its American premiere at the GableStage, a playhouse small enough to allow patrons in the last row to see beads of sweat dripping down a potential victim's nose.
Mark Styler (David Kwiat) is a writer working on his third book about serial killers. His subject is a man named Easterman, locked up in an experimental hospital for the criminally insane.
As the play opens, Styler is fussing around the hospital administrator's office, waiting for an interview and hoping for permission to talk to the killer. Dr. Farquhar (Bob Rogerson) arrives two hours late, says he can't recall making the appointment, and tries at first to brush off the cocky, seemingly exploitive writer.
But Styler's description of movie rights and magazine takeouts and the fame they might bring interests the doctor, who begins to negotiate a "sympathetic" treatment. The two men joust for position until Nurse Plimpton (Lisa Morgan) arrives, obviously distraught, and the atmosphere changes from testy to tense. It won't be long before talk turns to action.
There's a fairly simple formula just below the surface of Horowitz's story, but the quickly escalating horror and director Joseph Adler's adept use of verismo keeps Mindgame from seeming too pat. Puzzle aficionados will guess, or at least strongly suspect, what's going on in advance of each major plot twist. But if Mindgame fails the mental challenge, it mostly passes the goosebump test.
Rich Simone's set, with lighting by Jeff Quinn, is a very large, elegant office done in rich wood -- seemingly too much like a fancy estate in the English countryside to be a mental hospital doubling as a prison. Daniela Schwimmer's costumes, except for nurse Plimpton's at-first crisp white uniform, enhance the manor-house atmosphere that's another throwback to the older, more conventional stage mystery.
Once introductions are out of the way, Adler's cast is perfectly suited for the play's verbal as well as physical duels. The trio playing the main characters have been in this territory before. Morgan's a veteran of classic melodramas; Rogerson and Kwiat were at odds in Communicating Doors and renew their dramatic contest with both determination and vigor. Here, their toys include a razor blade, strait jacket, life-size skeleton, and those strange doors that add different possibilities every time they're opened.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
