WPCNR PHANTOM OF THE THEATRE. By John F. Bailey. March 11, 2005: Fort Hill Players winter production of Deathtrap, the longest running thriller ever on Broadway, is a revival of Ira Levin’s play-within-a-play that works and keeps the audience guessing. It brings back the John Barrymore of White Plains, D. Scott Faubel (denizen of The Journal-News news room in real life), for another one of his meaty performances in tough roles and introduces a new star to be, Mike Edmonds, just in his early 20s.

APPLAUSE. APPLAUSE: The cast of Deathtrap, sans Patti Rome greeted with a minute and a half of applause after their premier performance Friday evening.  Left to right, Richard Molyneaux (Porter Milgrim), D. Scott Faubel (Sydney Bruhl), Mike Edmonds (Clifford Anderson), Bona Crehan (Helga Ten Drop)Photo by WPCNR StageCam.

D. Scott Faubel, the Tommy Heinrich “Old Reliable” of the Fort Hill Players, (who has landed star turn after star turn from The Odd Couple to Art), creates a believable Sidney Bruhl  (played by Michael Caine in the movies) as a nasty old playwright whose bulging, gleaming eyes, and calculating nature thrill and chill. Faubel’s Bruhl has a slightly insane Captain Queeg edge to him that has this play going from laughs to horror in a gunshot and a lightning bolt.  

Faubel is not the Michael Caine type – but instead makes his Bruhl far more evil. Mr. Faubel has the ability to make you forget the famous actors who played the parts Mr. Faubel plays, a tribute to the Faubel method. He’s a dominator that takes a part and makes it his.

Welcome, Mr. Edmonds!

Faubel’s furtive mannerisms deliver the sinister side of the playwright without a hit, Sidney Bruhl, and his worthy foil is 22 year old Mike Edmonds in his first major role for the Fort Hill Players. Mr. Edmonds hails from Arizona and has come to New York to be an actor. He is one.

Edmonds plays Clifford Anderson, the student who attracts the attention of Bruhl during a summer writing course. As Act I opens, the audience observes Bruhl and his wife played by Patti Rome in her first major dramatic role for FHP discussing the play Mr. Anderson has written and sent to Mr. Bruhl for his opinion.

Bruhl, income dwindling and in need of a hit, is jealous because Anderson’s first time play is great. (Or so we are lead to believe). Bruhl and his wife discuss collaborating with the young playwright. Bruhl invites him over to discuss the possibilities. Bruhl is furious that one of his students has written the “one set, five character, moneymaker.”

Who is plotting against whom over the “valuable property” named “Deathtrap” is never quite clear.  The overriding theme is an inside look at writers’ vanity, their jealousy and lusting for success at any cost that exists in the real theatre. (Not to say anyone has killed anybody in the theater over a play yet. But, it could happen.)

You’re Killing Me or Are You?

Faubel, discussing dwindling finances observes, “Nothing recedes like success,” and voila, motive is born. The premise of the play:  some want that success enough to kill for it. What’s new?  Who is killing who in this play, how they are going to be killed, and were they really killed makes for bizarre twists that will engrosses the audience in the puzzle of the Deathtrap.

The play takes on two layers. The audience of 50 persons on opening night is taken on a serious of emotional swings as events they see are not always what they seem. From the first big turnaround “sold” by Patti Rome’s histrionics at the end of Act I, the audience buys the play and goes along for the wild ride.

Mr. Faubel’s timing is perfect, his desperation, his slinking,  (especially trying to find out what his young protege has locked in his desk drawer, is funny. Faubel’s pompous observations send-up the vainglorious playwrights of our time.

The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

But it takes two to tango and Mr. Edmonds  in the Christopher Reeve role (in the movie) Clifford Anderson,  the playwright-wanna-be, acts with the self-assured cockiness recalling to mind Presidents and Executive Officers we have known.

Mike Edmonds as Clifford Anderson. Photo by WPCNR StageCam

Edmonds, acts with an easygoing control is self-effacing, sycophantic, charming, playing to Bruhl’s ego with genuine sincerity. In Scene 3 of Act One when the amazing first murder takes place, Edmonds changes character smoothly from victim to co-conspirator and the audience buys it.  Edmonds looking like a White Plains High senior, builds his character through the play, and turns as evil as Bruhl in the play’s unexpected, shocking climax.  The audience swallows him all the way.

Like any good criminal,  Edmonds has you trusting him all the way and hating Bruhl, when it was really the other way around all along. Edmonds creates a Professor Moriarity-like superiority to his nemesis Bruhl when he vainly describes what has happened in an acid, mocking delivery. The audience’s collective jaws drop as the nice young man turns into not so nice young man. Edmonds face in his lecturing of Faubel took on  “the masque of Fu Man Chu,” the look of pure evil – the evil that it takes to kill.

Unlike the twerpy male movie leads of today,  Mr. Edmonds is a young actor who can act.

Two Dominators and three sidekicks.

Patti Rome, the statuesque brunette of the trio, More Than Music  in her debut in a dramatic role for FHP as Bruhl’s wife in Act One has to project and make her lines heard in her role, perhaps stating them more slowly. She delivered too quickly, too high and too quietly to cut through the “Snidely Whiplash” rumble of Faubel and the engaging elocution of charmer Edmonds.  Her body language and exasperation with Bruhl were genuine. It is an admirable first effort and she will get better. Ms. Rome did not stay for bows, as she was gifted with a new grand daughter Saturday evening and rushed to see the new actress.

Patti Rome as Myra Bruhl (in rehearsal). Photo by WPCNR StageCam

Rome, though has the most powerful moment in the play. She is the evening’s first key shocker and gets it exactly right.  Her horror at her husband’s deed at the close of Act One turns the audience into the play.

Ms. Rome gives this all she’s got, she screams piercingly, expresses anxiety, and creates a creeping hemorrhaging feel of panic that ices the theatre atmosphere much as panic and shame do in real life. Ms. Rome handled her lines well, but, in my opinion,  has to contralto them a little deeper in the back of her throat rather than speaking from the front of her mouth. She’s got all the emotion, body language and that worried wife role out there.

Brona Crehan as the ditzy psychic, Helga Ten Dorp, does a good comic turn as the neighborhood psychic who foresees what is to come, but gets it slightly wrong, keeping the audience guessing. However, Ms. Crehan overworks her Hungarian accent and needs to slow it down to make sure the audience gets her predictions. She’s a natural comedian, but she has to modulate slower to deliver the accent, perhaps a little less thickly.

One of the dangers with doing impressions of accents is you tend to do them too fast.  Take a cue from Peter Green's Count Dracula. He was effective because he was slow. You know what you’re saying, but the audience does not. Crehan has the flightiness of the eccentric down. She has the wonderful comic flare of Imogene Coca and is appealing to look at and balances the skullduggery afoot in this brooder.

The Rochambeau Theatre may have a lot to do with Ms. Rome and Ms. Crehan’s troubles with clarity, or maybe this reporter needs hearing aids. The high domed ceiling creates bounce, echo and tends to distort the women’s voices while mellowing the mens’.

Richard Molyneaux as Porter Milgrim, Bruhl’s lawyer, deserves admiration for skewering the blue-blazered Connecticut lawyer perfectly. I loved his Westport accent and thought I was looking in on Greenwich. I knew people like him.

Highlights.

The special effects in Act II are atmospherically perfect: lightning, thunder. The staging of shootings, stabbings, deaths are disturbing and real and neatly choreographed.

Best moments: The Faubel-Edmonds discovery scene at the top of Act II when Bruhl finds out what  his young lover Anderson is doing. Edmonds doing the famous explanation of the plot at the conclusion, and the horrifying denoument.

The Set Design by David Jacob the Director, was very Connecticut. However,   I did not like the situation of the writing desk being situated where it was upstage right,  because it forced Edmonds to speak to the back of the set when he is typing. Fortunately Edmonds has the pipes to overcome this. By placing the desk in the left center of the stage, audiences on the left angle in the wings are blocked. I deliberately moved my seat to the right side so I could see the centerstage action.

They cannot see the action behind the desk when they view from the left side. I have never seen a play where an actor is forced to speak straight to the back of the stage. The actors usually are angled laterally.

The lighting created what Producer Joan Charischak describes as “a glowing ember,” and the set takes on the aura of a sinister place. The lightning flashes and thunder and startling gunshots were jolts of reality. The producer reported a cable broke during the first act causing  shortcircuit, but the actors persevered admirably and the technical crew fixed the cable for Act II.

Mr. Edmonds and Mr. Faubel worked as a team. They were believable. Timing impeccable, interaction – especially on the violence, sobering and shocking. Mr. Edmonds reminds one of a young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Just 22, Mr. Edmonds was encouraged to audition by a friend of his at work, Suzanne Davis (whose Lucy in FHP’s Dracula  was another memorable performance by a beginning actor).  WPCNR looks forward to more of Mr. Edmonds’ work, he and Mr. Faubel nailed Toneys for this performance.

Deathtrap matinees Saturday at 2, this evening at 8 and next Friday and Saturday at 8 at The Roch, Rochambeau Theatre, 228 Fisher Avenue. For tickets, call 914-309-7278 or go to www.forthillplayers.com. Photo by WPCNR News