Wait Until Dark at ISF

Or: “Clever Girl”*

It is a surprisingly simple thing but the whole of the Wait Util Dark experience can be held in a single sound. As Susie Hendrix (Jodi Dominic) feels her sightless way around the basement apartment that is her world, her wedding ring scrapes against the water pipes that snake around Scott Bradley’s lowering set. The scratch of metal on metal serves as an unintended cue for the sinister forces that have invaded the Hendrix home with evil designs.

I must confess, dear reader, I was less than enthused when Fredrick Knott’s masterpiece was put on the Idaho Shakespeare Festival’s season. The tale of two small time conmen (Nick Steen and David Anthony Smith) trying to pull the wool over the blind wife of a photographer at the behest of the cheerful neighborhood psychopath (Arthur Hanket) that they might retrieve a special musical doll relies on the ability of the production to create absolute darkness, an impossible state of affairs to arrange in an outdoor theater. Still, the show (much caressed for its 1963 film adaption, but ever so much more evocative in person) is so well crafted in its internal direction and inductive clue-gathering, that it can still terrify in ambient illumination.

Enhanced by Lindsay Jones’s sound design, where shark-like electric guitars and the breath of nervous, cigaret-smoking women ripple across our ears, Joseph Hanreddy’s production is unadulterated but nicely nuanced. It’s like the variations in Susie and her husband Sam’s (Alex Syiek) couple’s handshake: playful, than fraught, then tender. One particular facet of the show, morally troubling but puzzlesome, is how Susie’s blindness is wrapped by other players. For Gloria (Elsie Pakiela) the young girl who’s attached herself to the Hendrix’s, it’s a great equalizer. For Sam its mildly (mildly) fetishized but proves to be just a part of an unconventional but warm and equitable relationship. For “Mike Talman” (Steen) the “carrot” con man, the criminal element buts against protective instincts as he begins to fall for his mark (of course introduced by falling in to him) while his partner and “stick” “Sgt. Carlino” (Smith), sees it as a weakness begging to be taken advantage of. And “Henry Roat Jr.” takes a horrid delight in mining his jollies from Susie’s helplessness. Even in the middle of playing his part in the long con he can’t help but extend a claw toward her, testing the bounds of her personal bubble.

Not that Susie is at all helpless. Beyond avant-guard lighting design and sharp plotting, what makes Knott’s story so thrilling is seeing the traditional thriller damsel getting herself out of distress. Aside from portraying the realistic abilities of a “Bronze Medal Blind Person,” Dominick is alive in her part; dancing between stories and states, unafraid of taking wilder leaps. When Susie’s alone with Sam she goofs, undulating and marionette-ing her was about him; when irked by Gloria she can spark with flash-pan cruelty. When roped into thinking her husband is not who he says, she’s literally shaken with doubt, floored with anxiety. And when she grows wise to scheme aimed at her, a knife-like cool snicks out like a switchblade. In arranging her own plots Dominic sweeps us along, gently defiant and witty. And in the dark, when the blood is spilled, she fights for her very life.

*read in the voice of Bob Peck’s Robert Muldoon from Jurassic Park.