The Woman in Black is an entertaining, unusually literary ghost drama for the Halloween season, though one that lacks much reason for existing outside its capacity to excite a degree of fear. Beautifully acted by Christopher Rutherford and Glenn Gover, the current Gorilla Theatre production is genuinely spooky — several times spectators shrieked — and pleasingly original. It won't remind you of anything else you've seen.
It features wonderfully discomfiting sound effects, super-serious characters (to raise the level of terror), and a ghost of dreadful countenance with nothing the least bit friendly about her. Skillfully directed by Ami Sallee Corley, Woman has everything but substance — some perspective on reality that might remain with us after the final curtain falls.
I suppose it's wrong to want more than chills and thrills from a Halloween play, but this drama is so consistently intelligent, a little authentic significance would hardly be out of place. Oh, well. If you're looking for a spine-tingler more intellectual than ZooBoo, this is your poison. It's about as nerve-wracking as these things get, and so gore-free that you can bring the (older) kids.
The play, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the novel by Susan Hill, begins in a Victorian theater where a man named Kipps (Gover) has hired an Actor (Rutherford) to help him tell a life-changing, true ghost story to family and friends. The Actor and Kipps finally decide that they will enact the story together, with the Actor playing the role of Kipps, and Kipps playing all subsidiary parts. Once this arrangement is finalized — it makes a certain sense on the stage at least — the horrific tale unfolds.
Kipps, an English solicitor, is ordered by his superior to go to the house of the late Alice Drablow in a frightening locale called Eel Marsh. There he is to represent his law firm at Drablow's funeral, and he's further to pore through her voluminous papers in search of anything the firm ought to know. Kipps is warned that the Drablow land is connected to the mainland by a causeway which is regularly washed out at high tide, and that he must plan carefully not to find himself stranded on the murky island.
At the funeral, a strange figure appears: a woman all in black, whose face, briefly visible, suggests that she suffers from a wasting disease. She's there, then she's gone — again and again she makes a fleeting appearance — and the longer he stays in Eel Marsh, the more obvious it becomes to diligent Kipps that he's literally being haunted. He dares to think that the ghost is harmless, but the specter has an agenda of her own, and vengeance to take. Not even innocent, good-natured Kipps can let his guard down where this wretched presence is concerned.
I don't know who plays the Woman in Black — she's not listed in the program, and not even the two male actors took a curtain call on the night I saw the play. But Rutherford and Gover are superb in their many parts, with Gover excelling as the anguished, urgent Kipps and then as Kipps' haughty boss as well as the laconic carriage driver who takes Kipps to Eel Marsh. Rutherford, one of the best young actors in Tampa, plays not only an impatient acting coach at the start, but also the often-worried, occasionally terrified Kipps-in-flashback.
Scott Cooper's cluttered-theater set is appropriately portentous: it contains a scrim on which is painted the large, mournful face of a woman, and an upper story in which the ghastly ghost throws malevolent tantrums. Jennifer Cunningham's costumes place us in an England Dickens might have recognized, and Chris Corley's crucial sound design has our hair standing on end even when nothing much has yet happened. There's also a fog machine that's not very convincing — but for that matter, I've never seen one that was.
There are a few defects in this otherwise solid production. There's the question of why solicitor Kipps, a man without training as an actor, appears so splendidly talented once the re-enactment of his story begins. There's an important twist at the drama's end which seems largely gratuitous, and there's the Actor's unlikely acceptance of the Woman in Black as some friend of Kipps who's taking part, unannounced, in the staging of Kipps' story.
Still, these distractions don't much interfere with our enjoyment of the tale. It's fun to be scared by an ultimately harmless work of fiction, and Woman is scary and fun and harmless.
And at its best… it's a scream.
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.