September 30-October 6, 2004
theater
Murder, He Wrote
 GUNNING IT: Gene Terruso (left) teases Nick Martorelli.  |
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If you're all Fringed out, if you've temporarily had enough of naked people doing loud things in peculiar venues, Sleuth is the show for you. This is theater The Way It Used to Be, by actors who can lay it on thick.
This old-fashioned murder mystery by Anthony Shaffer was made famous by Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine's film, not to mention its eight-year (!) run in London, followed by 2,000 (!) performances on Broadway. It arrives at Hedgerow complete with dinner jackets and brandy, multiple accents and the delicious performance by Gene Terruso, ably abetted by Nick Martorelli. Ken Marini directs this play as if it were the most complicated game of Clue ever invented.
It begins with Terruso's Andrew Wyke, an old-school mystery writer who just completed his latest novel,
. His detective is aristocratic, his policemen are inept dolts and his tricky plots are always deliriously convoluted. Television is not his "line of country," since he believes that the detective story is "the recreation of noble minds." Enter Martorelli's Milo Tindle, young lover of Wyke's wife, Marguerite, who has come at Wyke's invitation to his crumbling country manor house: "I understand that you want to marry my wife." According to her husband, a self-proclaimed sexual athlete, Marguerite "converses like a child and makes love like an extinct shellfish," so he is only too glad to be rid of her. For Wyke, sex is a game, murder is a game and the audience is seduced into a variety of real/unreal, scary/jokey events. And just wait until Act Two. Eventually the play will have something to say about self-righteous, pompous, class-conscious, xenophobic England, speechifying mightily against game-playing as a substitute for living life. Zoran Kovcic's set design is handsome, Cathie Miglionico's costume design seems to put quotation marks around every piece of clothing ("costume" indeed) and Jared Reed's sound design is both classic and parodic. Good fun all around.
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