Playwright: Charley Sherman, based on the novel by William Peter Blatty. At: WildClaw Theatre Company at the Viaduct, 3111 N. Western. Web: www.wildclawtheatre.com, $10, $20. Runs through: April 18
If you're talking about the definitive gold-star standard for terror, you're talking about William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist and John Carpenter's 1978 film Halloween. Embarking on a sequel to either is a thankless task; fall short of the fearsome perfection of the original, and you'll suffer the blood-drenched slings and arrows of inevitable comparisons.
With Legion, Blatty mines the themes he introduced in The Exorcist with considerably less success. Where the Exorcist tapped into primal psychological fears, Legion offers a façade of moody atmospherics veiling a pretentious and ridiculous plot.
In his adaptation of Blatty's novel for Wildclaw, Charley Sherman hews closely to the novelperhaps a bit too closely. The narrative is a hydra-like beast, subplots splitting off into ever-lessening tangents as corpses stack up like cordwood. It doesn't do to examine the tale closelycrafting a well-constructed story doesn't seem to have been Blatty's priority: He goes from lurid to ludicrous before the first body has had time to cool.
Such bloody preposterousness would be fine if Legion didn't have pretentions of being a philosophical treatise on the nature of evil rather than being a simple gorefest. Schlock, camp and cliche ( Asylums for the criminally insane, anyone? ) can be deviantly delightful, provided they don't put on airs. Here, there are airs aplenty. Blatty expects us to take all the violent and spooky excesses of the genre seriously, even though he fails to provide a story worthy of such consideration.
Flawed source material aside, Wildclaw's Legion is a laudable effort. Director Anne Adams' impressively large cast ( 14 actors portray more than 30 roles ) is fully invested in the work. Leading the way the shambling Lieutenant Kinderman ( Len Bajenski, well on his way to fully inhabiting the role at Legion's final preview ) an investigator who calls to mind Columbo immersed in a continuing-ed course in Western lit.
In Blatty's book, Kinderman manages to be both down-to-earth and pretentious, a paradoxical and unfortunate effect that is amplified on stage. A bit of editing would go along way with this character. When not quoting from the canon of Dead White Male Poets, Kinderman is focused on solving a string of murders that seem to have been committed by the Gemini Killer. Complicating matters is the fact that Gemini has been dead for 12 years. Of course, ( as anyone who has ever perused the daily horoscopes knows ) , Gemini is the sign of the twins. Cue the scary music.
Speaking of which: In the pitch-black moments before the lights come up on Legion, Scott Tallarida's piercing symphony of screaming minor key strings bathe the audience in sonic terror. With sound design by Tallarida and Mikhail Fiksel, Legion offers a worthy successor to Tubular Bells.