It's a pity what's happened to Gorilla Theatre this season. Two years ago I wrote that Aubrey Hampton and Susan Hussey's Tampa stage was becoming "a significant force in the local arts community." As proof, I adduced important Gorilla productions like Warren Leight's Side Man, David Marshall Grant's Snakebit, Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner and Bill Russell/Henry Krieger's Side Show. I might have added George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, and (if I could have seen the future), Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things (in a co-production with Stageworks). I went on to note that although Gorilla was still a venue in which Hampton and Hussey intended to produce their own work, the theater also seemed increasingly devoted to "notable plays from the national repertory that would otherwise have remained just rumors in The New York Times arts section."Well, that was then; this year the Gorilla season has included one premiere full of stereotyped characters (Diva, Dy, DB and Me, a co-production with The Looking Glass Theatre), an abysmal, amateurish production of a cult classic (The Rocky Horror Show, also with Looking Glass), and a cancellation (The Long Christmas Dinner, with Looking Glass again).
And now, as its scheduled fourth offering, Gorilla brings us founder Hampton's Sherlock & Shaw, a dreadfully boring murder mystery with about as much suspense as you'd find watching the hour hand on a clock. This is a play in which everyone speaks at great length on the slightest provocation, in which the so-called mystery is forgotten or ignored by the characters for long stretches, and in which we're forever being painfully reminded of the playwright's research. This is also a production in which Sherlock Holmes (Sean Sanczel) is unconvincing and Dr. Watson (Richard C. Adams) seems not to belong to the world of the play at all.
Fortunately, there are several fine performances — Tom Oakes as an uncannily effective Bernard Shaw, Slake Counts as Harley Granville-Barker, David C. Baker as Oscar Wilde, and Jessica Alexander as a campily sexy Alla Nazimova. But all the play's characters, with the exceptions of Granville-Barker and Wilde, are so overwritten, we can't help but wish someone had taken some gardening shears to their parts and cut out pages and pages of unnecessary dialogue. And we also can't help but wish that author Hampton weren't so intent on showing off his own historical sleuthing. If we want to know Shaw's or Wilde's life stories, we can read Michael Holroyd's or Richard Ellman's fine biographies of them. When we go to the theater, it's with the hopes of seeing a play — a carefully crafted, logically motivated play. With a dramatic action. Emphasis on "dramatic."
There is a plot to Sherlock and Shaw, though it repeatedly gets lost in the general gabfest. A theater manager named William Terriss is murdered outside London's Lyceum Theatre. When he was killed, Terriss was in the process of delivering Bram Stoker's so-called "Vampire Diaries" to Bernard Shaw. Now the diaries have disappeared, and Shaw wants Sherlock Holmes to find them. Holmes, with Dr. Watson right beside him, calls to the Lyceum a roomful of famous suspects: Wilde, Granville-Barker, Nazimova, Sir Henry Irving (Jack Brand), Ellen Terry (Eileen Koteles), and Wilde's latest boytoy Bobby Hunt (J. Stephen Jorge). Everyone talks interminably; Nazimova, for no good reason, breaks out into Salome's "Dance of the Seven Veils"; Holmes and Irving fence with each other, and finally Holmes announces (apropos of nothing) that he's identified the murderer. So he sets a trap that no self-respecting culprit would fall into; the culprit falls into it, and we finish with a lengthy, unmotivated confession. Then the play is, mercifully, over, and we hurry to our cars resolved to speak, from this day forward, only in monosyllables. And silence, we recall, is golden.
There are a few virtues to this largely regrettable production. Julie Jennifer Bartel's period costumes are often terrific — surely this is how Bernard Shaw dressed! — and Allen B. Loyd's set of Holmes' drawing room is moderately attractive. The direction, by author Hampton and Crystal Solana Bryan, is competent enough (though a conscientious director would have taken a machete to the dialogue), and Dawn Krumvieda's lighting is nicely unobtrusive. Alas, these elements, like Oakes' fine Shaw and Baker's ingratiating Wilde, are eventually overshadowed by the script's many failings.
This is a mystery without any tension, without that intellectually intriguing working out of a puzzle that is real mystery's attraction. Author Hampton has the right to be obsessed with Shaw and Company, but his fascination doesn't make the subject interesting to us. That requires the usual factors: efficient action, deft characterizations, riveting dialogue. Hampton has shown he can hold an audience's attention in earlier works like The Manhattan Play Doctor. But that comedy was about speed; this one is all exposition and stasis, swordplay or no swordplay.
In fact, this production raises only one real dramatic question:
What's the future of Gorilla Theatre?
New LiveArts Leader Harry Chittenden has been named the new executive director of the LiveArts Peninsula Foundation, the organization devoted to putting on plays about local Florida history. Chittenden, 59, replaces Diana Leavengood, who was executive director from November 2000 to February of this year, during which time LiveArts produced Webb's City: The Musical, The Manhattan Casino, The Floridians (a co-production with American Stage) and two video documentaries with the city of St. Petersburg. Leavengood resigned over a month ago to pursue her interests in film direction and other arts.
Chittenden is a Yale graduate who spent time as a company, road and house manager for New York theaters in the 1970s, and has more recently managed a public relations firm and a yoga studio. He'll be a full-time employee of LiveArts and says that his intent is to "continue to find Florida writers and produce their work — and do it more frequently. Hopefully four times a year, with maybe one big production every year or 18 months, and maybe down the road even more often than that."
Chittenden is enthusiastic about the LiveArts mandate: "I think it's a fabulous mission. It's very rare in Florida, it's rare in the country, that people are willing to step up and support original theater. I'm really thrilled to be a part of it, and I'll work my ass off to make it work."
Contact Performance Critic Mark E. Leib at 813-248-8888, ext. 305, or mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Mar 11-17, 2004.