Alien Hand, or Let the Right Be a Vision of the Left
Yet today Lady in the Dark is little known and almost never produced. It’s remembered almost entirely for a pair of songs that served as showstopping vehicles for the performers who introduced them: British star Gertrude Lawrence, whose “The Saga of Jenny” allowed her to drop her veddy English propriety for a bump-and-grind act, and up-and-coming Catskills comedian Danny Kaye, whose tongue-twisting “Tschaikowsky” launched his career as a nimble patter singer. These witty showpieces still pop up in sophisticated cabaret acts. But Hart’s script is virtually unplayable today, as Light Opera Works demonstrated a few years ago in a murky, disappointing revival. Its plot–about an unhappy career woman who learns from a week’s worth of psychoanalysis that what she really needs is a good man, not a profession–is ludicrously sexist. And the not-so-clever dialogue suggests that, as a writer, Hart was a lot more successful in his collaborations with George S. Kaufman (their partnership had only recently ended) than on his own.
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So it seems rather perverse to dispense with Lady in the Dark’s music while focusing on its text–which is exactly what Trap Door Theatre has done in Alien Hand, or Let the Right Be a Vision of the Left, director Catherine Sullivan’s experimental “interpretation” of the work. Yet by stripping away the score, Sullivan–a Los Angeles performance artist whose involvement with Trap Door dates back to her college friendship with Trap Door artistic director Beata Pilch at the California Institute of the Arts–finds hidden strengths in the long-neglected play. If Hart’s take on female psychology was absurdly simplistic, his interest in the way dreams express hidden fears and longings gave his script more depth than is usually acknowledged. By heightening its inherent darkness, Sullivan finds unexpected power in the original even as she critiques its shortcomings; and the creativity, quality, and intelligence of Alien Hand’s performance and design affirm Trap Door’s place at the forefront of Chicago’s fringe theater scene.
Alien Hand critiques Lady in the Dark’s outdated stereotypes while probing its universal implications about sexual terror by employing a simple but striking device: the actors play the subtext–the desires and conflicts hidden within the dialogue–in a boldly exaggerated style that heightens but never campily trivializes the characters’ emotions. This approach thrusts into the foreground the rage, terror, and lust that simmer beneath Hart’s urbane repartee and Gershwin’s snappy lyrics (recited here without their musical accompaniment), giving the show a weirdly hallucinatory quality that blurs the original distinction between dreams and “real life.” Reinforcing this style are Richard Norwood’s eerie, shadowy lighting (produced by, among other devices, an overhead projector) and Bob Rokos’s fascinating soundscape, which employs a variety of instruments and props, from a beat-up old accordion and an electric guitar played with a bow to a rubber beach toy, to create a disturbing aural representation of Liza’s internal stress (a well-placed microphone, for instance, transforms the sound of fingers idly tapping on a tabletop into maddening thuds).
In my June 5 review of the Organic Touchstone Company’s Coming of the Hurricane, I neglected to credit a crucial member of the show’s production team: sound designer Rodger D. Kurth, whose well-chosen background music and well calibrated effects contribute greatly to the atmosphere of this post-Civil War period piece.
