Rubik’s Cube, chess, crossword puzzles. Exercising the left-brain has its place. But what about the right brain? That beehive of activity that processes life inconsistencies, its fears and insecurities?
Everett Theatre’s “Private Eyes” by Stephen Dietz investigates.
This anything-but-romantic romantic comedy gets both sides of your CPU tripping. It’s logical, maybe. It’s emotional, maybe. It’s dark and guaranteed to engage, for sure.
The set up has an actress cheating on her actor husband with their director. Or so it appears. Like everything else, nothing is necessarily what it seems. Why so? Because, structurally, this is a play within a play within a play within a therapy session.
If that sounds complicated enough to confound the best of thinkers, it is.
On the other hand, there is love, hate, jealousy, raw desire, murderous revenge and despair, all of it buoyed up with intermittent moments of tenderness, revelation and —-believer it or not—-hope. Feelers can indulge themselves, no end.
Carissa Meisner — still fresh from her triumphant “Girl” in “Boy Gets Girl” — jacks it up another notch as Lisa, the aspiring actress with feelings for her husband while sleeping with her director. If Meisner was hip as the city girl made paranoid by a stalker, she is hip and naïve here. Sure, she comes across determined to make it big on stage but not without exposing a softer, more vulnerable side. A career bitch, she can be, and a vamp and an ingénue. Meisner’s much more than one-dimensional.
Directors bedding wannabe’s is nothing new. But Michael McFadden’s Adrian is. McFadden’s registers smug, funny, self-involved and boyish enough to make a believable womanizer who appreciates women. This Adrian is one of a kind.
Actors are known egoists, so self-absorbed you can’t be around them and get a word in edgewise. Asa Sholdez’s Matthew’s no exception. The corker here is Sholdez’s humanity coming through. No halfway-honest husband who suspects his wife of cheating can walk away from Matthew without suffering with him. Jealousy’s a killer.
Lisa Goshorn’s tough-talking private eye puts a cutting edge on goings-on with a kind of Dick Tracy-Sam Spade insistence on all the facts and nothing but the facts.
And Frank Holzheimer turns in pretty fair caricature of what we all think of shrinks: questions, questions, questions; no answers.
Director Eric Lewis lays out this production’s intent in his program notes: “Private Eyes” is a mystery. There is a difference between a mystery and a puzzle. With a puzzle, there is a solution. This story is presented for you to experience. Enjoy.”
Cryptic as all that sounds, Lewis makes sense. I experienced. I enjoyed.
Reactions? Comments? E-mail Dale Burrows at entopinion@heraldnet.com or grayghost7@comcast.net.
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