NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE — Jeffrey Hatcher’s “Wait Until Dark,” an adaptation of the Broadway thriller of the same name, later turned into a 1967 film starring Audrey Hepburn, should really be renamed “Wait in the Dark.” Because that’s what audiences are forced to do as they watch this needlessly convoluted and glacially paced play, now running at the Shaw Festival.
A woman sitting behind me at the performance I attended summed it up more perfectly than I ever could. “I’m so confused,” she blurted out, at full volume, right at the end of the first act.
She wasn’t alone. I was confused, too. And so was much of the audience.
Another woman complained that she had no clue what was going on. Her husband wore a classic why-did-you-drag-me-to-this-honey expression. To my right, meanwhile, a family spent intermission leafing through their programs, arguing among themselves about who was playing whom, amid all the disguises and fake identities. In short: The pervasive mood inside the Festival Theatre was one of bewilderment.
The irony of all this is that “Wait Until Dark,” as originally written by Frederick Knott, is a pretty straightforward suspense drama. It follows Susan (Sochi Fried), a woman who is blind and finds herself targeted by a gang of criminals after her husband, Sam (JJ Gerber), unwittingly takes possession of a drug-laced doll. With her husband absent, Susan is forced to outsmart her assailants by relying solely on her gumption and the help of her cunning young neighbour, Gloria (Eponine Lee).
Hatcher’s version of the play moves the action back from the 1960s to 1944. Setting the drama during the Second World War certainly heightens some of the story’s tension and sense of paranoia.
But the American playwright does more than merely tinker with the time period. He’s stuffed his adaptation with so much unnecessary exposition that the first act nearly grinds to a halt. For the audience, it’s sheer information overload.
Why, for instance, do we need to know all the intricacies of how the con men communicate with each other using the blinds in Susan’s basement apartment? Or the convoluted backstory of how Susan’s husband met the woman who handed him the doll? Or every painstaking detail about each of the fake aliases that the criminals assume?
Hatcher plies his audience with all this information, but never makes it clear why it’s necessary. The result: instead of building any sense of suspense, his script ultimately deflates like a sad, day-old balloon.
The best part of “Wait Until Dark” should be its final showdown between Susan and the gangsters, but Hatcher takes so long to get there, with far too many meandering side quests along the way, that the play’s conclusion ultimately arrives as a letdown.
“That’s it?” exclaimed the same woman behind me at the final blackout, her voice filled with an air of annoyance. Again, she was just vocalizing what most of the audience was also likely feeling.
Director Sanjay Talwar does his mightiest to compensate with his production and, on some levels, he succeeds. Lorenzo Savoini’s two-storey set, depicting Susan and Sam’s basement apartment, is disquieting, while Louise Guinand’s lighting designs eerily play with shadows and silhouettes.
As Susan, Fried plays up her character’s quiet intellect, but her central role is largely dimensionless, and Fried can’t quite make up for that. Bruce Horak is appropriately terrifying as the devious gangster Roat and Martin Happer is convincing as his sidekick Carlino. But the standout performance of this production belongs to Lee, whose resilient Gloria forms a powerful bond with Susan.
The merits of this revival aside, there’s not much else to enjoy in Hatcher’s version of “Wait Until Dark.” It’s a play that, much like its main character, leaves its audience stumbling through its dense narrative as if they were completely in the dark.
