Wait Until Dark
Shaw Festival 2025
Photo: Michael Cooper
Shaw Festival 2025/Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, directed by Sanjay Talwar, Festival Theatre, closes Oct. 5.
Just because Susy is blind does not mean that the audience has to be blind too. This show was so dark, you could not see what was happening on stage. I don’t know what director Sanjay Talwar was thinking.
I also don’t know what the set designer was thinking. This is supposed to be a basement brownstone in Greenwich Village, but it had the longest staircase you’ve ever seen. The basement must have been in the bowels of the earth. Lorenzo Savoini is a very good designer. Was it just to fill the space of the Festival Theatre stage? The look was bizarre, to say the least.
Sochi Fried is one of the best actors at the Shaw Festival, and she did a marvellous job at being blind. She really did, but somehow things just didn’t coalesce around her.
Bruce Horak who plays Harry Roat, the absolute weasel of the mob out to get Susy, just wasn’t mean or scary enough and as her foil, he has to be her match or you don’t have a show.
In other words, this production just did not work on any level. It didn’t have any tension and at the end, when Susy and Roat are struggling in darkness, we have absolutely no idea what is happening. How she manages to overpower Roat and kill him with the knife is just incomprehensible. We just hear grunts and groans and not even very scary ones. It was more funny than alarming.
The basic story is that a scared woman asks Susy’s husband at the airport if he could take care of a doll for her, and she would pick it up from him later. Because of that, the doll filled with heroin ends up in their home. Susy’s husband Sam (JJ Gerber) is lured away on a false photography job in order to get him out of the house, which allows the bad guys to get into the house to pick up the doll. Only they can’t find the doll because the upstairs neighbour, little Gloria (Eponine Lee), has taken it.
In order to get the doll back, Roat comes up with a complicated scheme.
One of the bad guys (Martin Happer) pretends to be Detective Carlino looking for bad guys. Another henchthingy (Kristopher Bowman) pretends to be Mike, an army buddy friend of Susy’s husband in order to ingratiate himself into the house. And so with Carlino the detective, theoretically coming and going, and Mike being around all the time, they search for the doll, which blind Susy can’t see them doing. And so the plot thickens until Susy cottons on that there’s something terribly wrong and enlists Gloria to be her ally.
But what should have been a tension-filled drama was just a blank, particularly because you couldn’t see what was happening. The stage lighting, or the lack of it, I presume was mandated by the director. Louise Guinand is a very distinguished veteran lighting designer and I can’t believe she would come up with this on her own. The further back you were in the house, the stage must have looked like the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Jeffrey Hatcher, who did the adaptation of the play from the original by Frederick Knott, set the story back into the 1940s from the original mid-60s. What he gained from that, I don’t know because I can’t see what the difference the 20 years makes. For his part, Hatcher said it enhanced its theatrical viability, deepened character motivations, refocused elements of deception, and made the emotional stakes higher by putting it back in the war. If this doesn’t sound like so much bafflegab what does. The only valid statement was that it made the friend, an army buddy, more logical.
Happer and Bowman were okay, as was Lee, and Fried is as good as you’re going to get as an actor at the Shaw Festival. Nonetheless, between the longest steps in the world to a basement apartment, a bad guy who just wasn’t tough enough, and a stage that you couldn’t see, Wait Until Darkwas not a happy experience. Nothing gelled together. This was a show of missed opportunities.