Review: "The Thing on the Doorstep," Salem Theatre
The production runs Sept. 17 through Oct. 4, at Salem Theatre, 90 Lafayette Street, Salem, MA. Dates and more details here.
I went to see the production on its second night, with my friend G. I had no idea what to expect, never having heard of Salem Theatre till this production occurred. The space is a tiny storefront theater, with no lobby and a front door that opens from the street right into the auditorium. (There were two huge overhead heating ducts that ran right through the theater space and evidently were controlled from another business, because they switched on and off automatically throughout the play, with dull roaring sounds. It's a tribute to the performers that they carried on as if nothing was happening.)
The production was designed with a stage that filled the center of the space, and two banks of audience seats that faced each other across the set. G. and I had to walk across the living-room-interior set to get to our seats. It was uncomfortably intimate. This may have been intentional. We audience members were arranged so that we looked across the action and saw one another's reactions. The stage depicted a 1920s-era living room, with a nice old sit-up-and-beg telephone and a painting of Cotton Mather on the wall, because it's a Lovecraft story and Cotton Mather was totally at those witch trials in person (well played, set designer).
Lovecraft has a reputation for being impossible to adapt to film, so I was dubious about how well a play could work. To be honest, I am a Lovecraft fan of decades' standing, and the short story "The Thing on the Doorstep" is important to me; this makes me an unpleasable audience, because no performance of the play is ever going to live up to the production that plays in my head when I reread the story. That said, this theatrical adaptation both frustrated and intrigued me.
Let me address the bad qualities first. There was too much exposition. Tons of it. Reams of it. Even a little exposition would have been too much. But this went on for minutes at a time. The opening narration was delivered by Daniel Upton (Andy LeBlanc), standing onstage and monologuing for paragraph after paragraph of text, straight from the story. This was a poor decision on the adapters' parts. It went on for minutes on end, and I might have walked out in frustration if I hadn't been sitting in a section where I'd have had to walk across the stage to leave the theater. I'm not that rude, yet, so I stayed where I was. But gosh, it was hard to sit through. I wanted to jump up and shout, "SHOW, DON'T TELL!" Everything that was conveyed in those huge indigestible monologues could have been shown to us in dialogue and action, or omitted, without losing anything important.
Things improved after the opening, but exposition recurred throughout the play. It was all unnecessary. Audiences are not stupid. The exposition spelled out things we could have understood from dialogue and subtext, without being spoon-fed explanations. G. remarked that it seemed to come from love for the source, and I think the same; but the love was misplaced.
In any case, I'm glad I stayed. There was a lot to like about the production, and it got better as time went on. All the actors made interesting choices, and brought something to their roles that I hadn't considered before. By the way, Andy LeBlanc as Daniel Upton did well with a tough job: he had to win over the audience by starting the play with poor material, and eventually he did draw me into the story. The play didn't really take off, though, until he was allowed to be a character instead of a plot device, and interact with other people.
Oh-one more bit of adverse criticism. There were a lot of line flubs. Every performer had at least a couple. That took me out of the moment; the actors sounded like they could have used an extra week of rehearsals.
Eventually, the play brought out the tension and pathos of the story very well. The short story's impact comes from a real-life horror: watching your friend's life go off the rails, while you are helpless to interfere because you don't understand the problem until it's too late. That came across nicely on a stage.
Andy LeBlanc as Dan Upton was the backbone of the play. It was a demanding role: Upton remained onstage through both acts, as other characters came and went around him. Upton was both the exposition guy and the audience surrogate. Mr. Leblanc did a fine job of conveying the despairing, confused mood of the piece. His character had to do a lot of panicking and watching in dread, but was also the stable person on whom other characters relied. Mr. Leblanc was a strong, steady presence and made good use of body language and his expressive eyes to direct the audience's attention.
Tom Rash as Edward Derby was also good. He gave the role lots of cartoony, exaggerated enthusiasm from the first moment onstage, and I immediately bought him as a sweet and fatally naïve man-child who thinks he's sophisticated. This left a lot of room for character development, as Edward gets older, sadder, wiser, and eventually madder and deader, and Mr. Rash conveyed the decline very well. A lot of Edward Derby's lines are taken straight from the short story, which actually worked in this case. He didn't hit the notes I was expecting; I'd imagined Derby's breakdown as tears and self-pity, but Mr. Rash went more for helpless rage. “I'll kill THAT ENTITY! Him, her, it-I'll kill it with my own hands!” Edward screams in gender-normative panic.
There's a lot of male fear of girl cooties fear of the female body. Asenath Waite's power is that she can take your body and stick you in a woman's body (a yucky Innsmouth monster woman, at that). But there's also a layer where Asenath is manipulating society's expectation that women are weak, innocent, and mentally inferior to men, because by the time we meet Asenath, she's secretly an evil old man who murdered his daughter and moved his soul into her body. That's a hell of a character to have to convey onstage. Kate Hamilton gave a severe, vamp-like performance, staring people down and making excellent use of cold silences. It was subtle, enough to make me feel there was something off about Asenath, and to make it plausible that other characters were frightened of her without knowing why. Ms. Hamilton had a fine moment late in the play, where Asenath stared the nicer characters down, and the look in her eyes said, “We all know I'm evil, and there's nothing you can do about it,” without the need for words.
Actually, the production missed a chance there. We saw Edward Derby's body with Asenath animating it, but we never saw what happened when it was the other way around-it would have been cool if Edward had shown up in Asenath's body, tried to ask for help, but then lost his nerve. I think Ms. Hamilton could have played that well.
Certainly, her silent performance in the last moments of the play was disturbing and awful beyond anything I'd imagined it would be, and I think it made everyone in the theater flinch. I knew what was coming, and I was still scared.
There were genuinely frightening moments that caught me off-guard, throughout the second act. One of my favorite ideas in theater is the conceit where two people switch bodies, forcing the actors to portray each other's characters, and these performers handled that well. Mr. Rash had some neat, creepy moments as Asenath-in-Edward, smirking, imitating Ms. Hamilton's aggressive stare, and speaking in an overly careful voice. (I. am. Your friend. Daniel. There. Is nothing. Weird about me. Is there?) There was also a nasty jump-scare late in the play; the characters are having a nice, relaxed chat for once, and then Edward leaps up, screams his lungs out, and goes into a meltdown on the floor. It was well-staged and well-timed, and it frightened me in the best possible way.
The play kept the story plausibly non-supernatural in the first act. I thought that was a good touch. We all know it's going to wind up as supernatural horror, but, in the beginning, the conflict is based in everyday, relatable things. Fights with overbearing family members, fear of adulthood and responsibility, and a marriage that the bystanders disapprove of. It was ordinary enough that once the supernatural elements took over they were dissonant.
There are at least two real-world horror stories that could be happening in the story, if you ignore the supernatural implications. One is that Asenath Waite is trapped in an abusive marriage (her husband locks her in the house, forbids her to talk to people), and she has no one to turn to, because people think she's a creepy witch lady. The other is that Edward Derby is trapped in an abusive marriage (he's afraid of his wife, the neighbors hear a man crying, he goes on self-destructive rampages), and he can't ask his friends for help because That Doesn't Happen To Men. The play left those options open for a while, and was the better for it.
Mind you, the twist was still obvious. At intermission I asked G. what she thought was happening, and she said,
“Asenath's possessed by the spirit of her father, and the spirit's going to possess Edward too because it wants a male body.”
There's tension in saying, well, we all know what's happening; what are the good guys going to do about it? (Well, faint a lot, for starters. Lots of swooning in Lovecraft. Mr. Leblanc had to faint once, Ms. Hamilton once, and Mr. Rash was reeling, writhing, and fainting in coils. They did it beautifully.)
The play added Upton's wife and Edward Derby's father as characters. They remain offstage in the story; in the play they're thankless roles, but they added to the play because they contrast their ordinary humanity with all the weird 'n eldritch elements. Sarah Upton (Kimberly Feener) was portrayed as a strong-headed, no-nonsense suffragette, but the character was mostly there to be a foil: a feminist, to contrast with Asenath's male-supremacist self-loathing, and happily married, to contrast with whatever the hell Edward and Asenath are doing. Mr. Derby (Victor Brandelise) was there to be a Heavy Father, but his few scenes highlighted Edward's weak-willed, childish nature nicely.
I liked the subtle sadness in the scenes after Edward Derby's marriage and the death of his father. Tom Rash and Andy LeBlanc were believable as lifelong friends. Edward can't seem to smile or make eye contact, and he poses questions about what one should expect out of marriage, asking for help without admitting there's a problem. Upton thinks he's being helpful by talking about how Sarah used to kick him in bed, and they fight sometimes, but that's fine and it doesn't mean your relationship is in trouble... Meanwhile, Edward Derby is sitting staring at the floor, more lost and numb with every word. Whatever his problems are, they're far beyond anything Dan imagines. It was well-written, well-acted-just a beautiful use of implication and subtext, and aagh, I loved it.
The script included sly jokes and references to other Lovecraft stories, to troll the fans in the audience. There are casual conversations that are about Cthulhu Mythos boogeymen if you know what you're listening for. Derby returns from his honeymoon visit to the plateau of Leng and gives Dan Upton a carving of Cthulhu as a present; everyone knows there's something odd about the people of Innsmouth; characters talk about an Antarctic expedition mounted by Miskatonic University. It worked well because it was nonessential enough not to annoy the mainstream audience members.
There was one good use of exposition in the play. At the very end, the letter that delivers the Horrible Revelation was spoken aloud by Edward, standing alone in a spotlight. It actually worked as a performance, because the letter is a desperate cry to be understood and it's sparse and underwritten, as Lovecraft goes. That was the one point in the play where a monologue was appropriate. By then, I felt the play had earned it.
So, I suppose I have a few opinions about this play. Overall, I'm glad I went. Everyone involved brought a lot of creativity and invention to the table, and even where it failed for me, it was still interesting.
It deserves a bigger audience than the few people who showed up last Friday night; the production isn't getting a lot of publicity, and I can't even remember how I heard about it. And I'm the target audience! (Or so I assume, as I'm a theater nerd and a Mythos nerd.) It's the best-kept secret in supernatural theater. If you're at all into horror and can get to Salem during the next two weekends, I would recommend it. By the way, I chatted briefly with Isaiah Plovnick, the director, who says he's working on a stage adaptation of “The King in Yellow,” so I look forward to seeing more weird fiction theater from that quarter.
Edited to add: hey, nothing to do with the play, but I was just checking a reference and found this painting of Asenath by Paco Rico Torres. What do you think--too overtly evil? I like it.
