Dial ‘M’ For Money

Most people expect something special from the theater. After all, we're surfeited with drama — on television and movie screens — and the experience of watching live actors isn't satisfying enough in itself to make just any play attractive. There's also the argument from the pocketbook: Network TV is free, movies only cost about eight dollars, and if we're going to pay 20 or 30 bucks or more, then the event that we've purchased our ticket for had better offer more than we can find on a screen.

Often enough, it does: banquets of language as in Shakespeare or, more perversely, Mamet; visual spectacle as in Miss Saigon or The Lion King; live music and singing as in umpteen musicals; intellectual depth as in Pirandello; raids on the truth as in Chekhov; news of the human condition as in Beckett. Not that these desiderata don't ever turn up on film or video; but where theater is concerned, we somehow feel we have the right to them. Just look at the plays that have recently opened in the Tampa Bay area: Wicked, Topdog/Underdog, Private Eyes and Stop Kiss. Each is extraordinary in some way. Each offers to show us something we can't find elsewhere. This is the unspoken promise of theater, and I think it's one that most spectators appreciate.

Which is why it's so dispiriting to see a play like Frederick Knott's Dial 'M' for Murder on the boards at American Stage. First produced in London in 1952, Dial 'M' plays now like a detective show from American TV in, say, the early 1960s. This is shallow, meaningless drama that's been far outstripped even on TV by shows like Columbo and Miami Vice, and has no old-time virtues to compensate for its insignificance.

Its plot — a "perfect murder" plan goes awry — feels mechanical and clichéd, its characters lack roundness, its language is unexceptional and even two of the best actors in the Tampa Bay area — Brian Shea and Katherine Michelle Tanner — fail to rescue it from irrelevance. The last time a play with so little to recommend it could be found at American Stage was several years ago, when Nunsense A-Men somehow found its way to downtown St. Pete.

I suppose the intention, then as now, was to entice an audience of non-theatergoers into the house for some harmless fun. But I'd like to argue that this "fun" isn't harmless, that we depend on our top theaters to aim high in their programming, and that all lovers of culture in this part of Florida are losers when an important local company lowers its standards.

As to the inevitable counter-argument — that theaters have to make money, after all — I can only say that not all compromises are equal. Surely there are popular plays out there that have more to offer than Dial 'M'.

The play's plot will sound familiar even if you never saw Hitchcock's big-screen version (1954) with Ray Milland and Grace Kelly. An Englishman, Tony Wendice, cognizant that his wife has been unfaithful, plots to murder her. Aware that he'll be a suspect and needs an alibi, he finds a fellow Cambridge graduate — Captain Lesgate — with much to conceal, and blackmails him into doing the deed. He arranges for Lesgate to get into the Wendice home when only Margot Wendice is there, and for Lesgate to hide behind some curtains near a telephone. At the agreed-upon time, Tony Wendice will call, Margot will come to the phone and Lesgate will creep up behind her and strangle her.

But the plan doesn't work: Margot's tougher than she seems, the wrong person is killed and a clever (yawn) police inspector arrives to smoke out the truth. The wild card is Margot's lover — a television writer named Max Halladay — who wants to outwit the police with a plan of his own. I won't say anymore, except to insist that Police Inspector Hubbard is — as written — triteness itself, and the play's climax is so lame that all the participants should be issued crutches.

Only two of the show's five actors find ways to surpass the script's limitations. Christopher Swan as Tony Wendice offers such a bright exterior, you can almost forget that he's plotting a capital crime. Swan is a fine actor, and he manages, against all odds, to turn a stock character into someone slightly original, an egotist cheerfully convinced that he can outwit his wife, his thug of choice and the police.

Also excellent is Byron Patterson as would-be perpetrator Captain Lesgate. Thanks to Patterson's canny portrayal, Lesgate comes across as a strong man repressing a great deal of anger, one who says very little because the alternative is to explode.

The other performances are all problematic. Some months ago, Katherine Michelle Tanner played all hundred facets of her character in Proof, but Margot Wendice has only two dimensions, and Tanner doesn't add others. Brian Shea as Max Halladay never convinces us that he and Margot were once lovers — there's not an ounce of chemistry between them — and adds nothing interesting to a character who's seriously underwritten.

Finally, Doug Landrum as Inspector Hubbard doesn't begin to live up to the stereotype of the detective with tricks up his sleeve. Hubbard should be the character on whom all right-thinking audience members place their hopes, but as portrayed by Landrum, he's bland and oh-so-predictable, without a glimmer of wit. His importance at the climax has to be taken on faith.

And then there's the question of John O'Connell's direction. Sure, he moves bodies around the stage with the expected facility, but doesn't he have to take some responsibility for the black-and-white performances? Possibly the best thing in the play is Michael Dayton's wonderful set design, of a pricy London apartment that's been kept up immaculately. Angela Hoerner's costumes are also first-rate, and Joseph P. Oshry's lighting is, as usual, impeccable. Too bad that the play isn't as interesting as the design.

And too bad that American Stage, one of the best theaters in the Bay area, is wasting our time with this warmed-over melodrama. To answer my own question, yes there are better compromises — in the mystery genre, Sleuth and Deathtrap, for example — and there are past Broadway successes from, O'Neill to Neil Simon, that have more to offer than this bit of theater flotsam. If we can't have Ibsen, must we have Frederick Knott? And why Knott when there are reruns of Mannix and The Rockford Files on TV?

Of course, theaters have to make money. So I hope American Stage cleans up on this venture.

'Cause there's no other motive that could possibly justify it.

This article appears in Feb 1-7, 2006.