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WINDY CITY TIMES
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THEATER REVIEW The Castle of Otranto
by Mary Shen Barnidge 2009-10-14
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This article shared 3910 times since Wed Oct 14, 2009
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Playwright: adapted by David M. Rice from the novel by Horace Walpole. At: First Folio Theatre on the Mayslake Peabody estate, 1717 31st, Oak Brook. Phone: 630-986-8067; $23-$30. Runs through: Nov. 1
Horace Walpole was a star in his own right, of course. If not for his seminal novel, published in 1794, centuries of Old-Dark-House thrillersMary Shelley's Frankenstein, among themwould never have been written. Besides, when your performance space is a sprawling pseudo-Tudor manor house, complete with a fully-outfitted Franciscan chapel, it's only natural for a theatre company's aesthetic to lean toward the gothica literary label nowadays associated with chick-lit shiveries, but once signifying chronicles as dense and weighty as any high-calorie Naming of Roses or Coding of DaVincis.
A baroque plot, involving complicated terms of inheritance between two powerful families in 16th-century Italy, introduces the neo-Jacobean elements that comprise the hallmarks of the genre to this day: cruel and/or negligent parents, helpless virgins, mysterious strangers, a ready supply of edged weapons, grisly phantoms, preternatural phenomena ( most notably, a tombstone that spontaneously seeps blood ) and ghostly interventions in the form of talking portraits, convenient thunderbolts, and incandescent vapors.
Reading matter designed to be savored slowly over long, firelit winter evenings offers a potentially cumbersome amount of narrative to pack into the abbreviated time of modern live performance. On its opening night, David Rice's adaptation for the First Folio stage, clocking in at a tidy two and a half hours with one intermission, could not conceal unmistakable signs of last-minute editing, preventing actors from fully immersing themselves into their operatic personae and ornate milieu. ( When your stage measures 48 feet by 35 feet with multiple levelsmaking for lengthy tramps even in the simple course of conversationthe traffic-control factor cannot be discounted, either. )
The cast of fresh young talents combined with seasoned northwest-suburban retainers were clearly on the right track, however, needing only a little settling-in time to overcome the stumbles engendered by insufficient textual and logistical familiarity before finding the correct pace for this Classics-Illustrated brand of period drama. And amid a plethora of shriek-and-giggle shows for the Halloween season, it can't be denied that First Folio's ambitious project, whatever its flaws, offers a refreshingly adult reminder of a time when "horror" was a product of things lurking unseen. |
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This article shared 3910 times since Wed Oct 14, 2009
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