Playwright: Blake Montgomery and cast. At: Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter. Phone: 312-491-1369; $20. Runs through: Nov. 3
As its name suggests, Noir is a tribute to the shadowy tales of greed, lust, murder, cross and double-cross honored in an entire genre of detective fiction in print and, most notably, on film. Cinema noir doesn't have to be a detective story—The Sweet Smell of Success isn't, for example—but dick and noir are four-letter words that frequently go together.
As rendered here, Noir is iconic and generic. It's iconic in that situations, scenes and dialogue—about 90 percent of the show—are taken directly from noir classics including The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and a few more. It's generic in that the characters, for the most part, are not named or distinguished. There's the private eye, his Girl Friday and various femmes fatales. Two men play the gumshoe, and it's impossible to say if they are aspects of the same person or uneasy partners the likes of Miles Archer and Sam Spade. Whichever, they encounter numerous blind alleys, dark shadows, rainy nights ( real rain in the Building Stage production ) and dames ( played by four actresses ) . Like a bad dream that won't go away, it's always the same but different: murders, Mickey Finns and women with more curves than a roller coaster and more twists than a bowl of spaghetti.
Despite the familiar scenes and dialogue, Noir is a dreamlike abstraction of moments rather than a literal story; a performance piece played out with monochromatic set, lighting, costumes and pale makeup as close to movie black-and-white as possible. After all, Technicolor is one of the things that killed Cinema Noir. However, beyond the beautiful physical production—its lithe cast choreographed as much as directed—Noir doesn't offer much. It lacks the intellectual and emotional heft of earlier Building Stage achievements, such as Dustbowl Gothic and Moby Dick. Perhaps it's less fulfilling precisely because the Cinema Noir repertoire is so well known. This production doesn't interpret or comment on the genre, but only calls attention to its standard devices, the repeated patterns of storytelling that recur film after film.
Noir is a beautiful and stylish objet d'art, an elegant living shadowbox with costumes by Meghan Raham, all-important lighting by Lee Keenan ( assisted by Ryan Williams ) and scenic design by Raham, Keenan and director Blake Montgomery ( the founder/artistic director of Building Stage ) . The ubiquitous Kevin O'Donnell provides the smoky sound design, which compliments the smoke, fog and rain that surround the players. This show would be perfectly at home presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art rather than at a River West warehouse. At 75 minutes, it's a good prelude to a River West dinner; however, it's an amuse-bouche, not an entree.