Playwright: Michael Nowak, Mike Nussbaum, Kathleen Thompson and Paul H. Thompson
At: City Lit Theatre at Edgewater
Presbyterian Church, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr
Phone: 773-293-3682; $25
Runs through: Oct. 26
First, let's make one thing clear: this is not Elizabethan verse tarted up in storefront-circuit modern dress. No, this revival from the Golden Age of off-Loop Theater is a homage to the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as translated by Hollywood into the cinematic genre known as film noir. And if classics buffs detect in the plot a resemblance to a certain tragedy by William Shakespeare—well, everybody's entitled to their opinion.
The year is 1945. Laconic PI Harry receives a call from his recent army buddy, Nat Hamill, who has discovered a recorded message leading him to suspect that his father, the head of a megamillion-dollar movie company, was murdered. Harry goes to Malibu to investigate the Hamill household: merry widow Lillian, slick uncle Ralph, meddling business manager Paul Owen and his two grown children, playboy Keith and druggie Anita—every one of whom have a motive to bump off the late studio chief. Of course, Nat's war experience has left him somewhat mentally unstable, but when a reel from Double Indemnity is slipped into a private screening and Ralph goes bughouse, revenge soon overtakes law in the quest for justice.
Collaborative authors Michael Nowak, Mike Nussbaum, Kathleen Thompson and Paul H. Thompson have crafted their requisite frozen-lipped repartee ( 'Who's been fiddling with your thermostat?' asks a flirtatious Anita, only to receive the gruff reply 'Maybe the pilot's out' ) so skillfully that it almost eclipses the keen accuracy of their literary transposition: A comedy duo called Rosie and Gillie pay a visit, a pair of morgue attendants swap philosophical observations and the District Attorney is named 'Jordon Brass.' Since the prize is not a kingdom but money, and the weapons not swords or daggers but guns, the victims don't all die as we expect, but in the end, Harry and Brass are left to clean up the loose ends as honorably as they can.
Such intrigue-riddled chivalry could easily emerge ( to use Harry's simile ) murkier than a Bloody Mary cocktail, if the ensemble—directed by Mike Nussbaum, a member of the show's original 1983 creative team—did not replicate their source's stylistic mannerisms perfectly. But every actor in this City Lit production, including the lonely saxophone punctuation provided by Christopher Kriz's sound design, delivers its tarnished-sparkling dialogue with a timing and inflection so sharp, you could slash your wrists on it. Be smart—go see them.
