A Utah theater review by Ben Christensen
Provo’s Echo Theatre has a new location, and it appears to be haunted. The new theater, located just north of Center Street on 100 East, is a much larger venue than the old one, with rows of seats facing a traditional stage rather than the theater-in-the-round of the previous location. While I was a big fan of the more intimate venue on University Avenue, the larger stage of the new one will give Echo opportunities to do shows that wouldn’t have worked so well in the round—shows like The Woman in Black. This creepy ghost story about a small town in England haunted by a vengeful spirit is well placed at the new Echo Theater, where the stage’s backdrop, the fuller sound system, and the more advanced lighting options are used to full effect to create an atmosphere of suspense.
Atmosphere is a major part of Woman in Black, as important as the characters. If the play has a weakness it’s that it’s a little slow in the beginning, but this is necessary to set the tone of suspense. As the story progresses, dim lighting—including several full blackouts—is used to create an eerie ambience. Occasionally the only light on stage is a match or a flashlight. The sound system lulls the audience into a false sense of safety with the monotonous tick-tock of a clock, then suddenly a chilly whisper creeps through the air from behind you. This is another advantage of the new Echo over the old: There is no longer a club with blaring music next door, so the sound technicians have more control over the sound and thus the mood (although there were a few times that noises from the street distracted). A sheer curtain hanging at the back of the stage appears to be a simple backdrop at first, but when characters go behind and light shines through the curtain, it becomes an obscuring fog, one more place for scary things to jump out at you.
The Woman in Black employs a very small cast of two. This production has both roles double-cast, so if you were to go on two consecutive nights you’d likely get a rather different show each night. On the night I went, Joseph Skousen and Jason Purdie were on stage. Skousen plays an actor hired to help tell a story another man has experienced. He has a charismatic presence onstage and a great range of emotion that he uses effectively to play a character playing another character, then switch back to his own character at the appropriate moment. Purdie plays the man whose story is being told, and in the play within the play that man acts as a handful of minor characters he had interacted with. He switches between different British accents to distinguish the characters and manages to pull off something I imagine would be quite difficult—portraying an amateur actor who starts off with poor acting skills and improves through the course of the play. Exactly how the titular character, the woman in black, becomes a presence in the play when the cast of two men is busy playing other characters, is a fun surprise that I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say that she has a definite presence in the theater, and her presence ups the creepy level by a factor of ten.
My quibbles with this production are few: the above-mentioned slow start, the reliance of the narrative on talking heads for long stretches, the director’s note in the program that tells me what lesson I’m supposed to learn from the play (a pet peeve of mine). The strengths of the production more than make up for these weaknesses. If you are in the mood for a captivatingly spooky story to get you ready for Halloween, this is a great show for you.
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I saw this on 10/14/2013. It was fantastic. They did a great job.Can’t wait to go see it again.