SHOW BUSINESS WEEKLY DECEMBER 2001

REVIEWS: THEATER

The Stranger
Adapted, designed and directed by Frank Cwiklik
At the Red Room Theater

Review by Steven Boone

Orson Welles dismissed his 1946 thriller The Stranger as his worst film, a project he took on only to show the studios that he could deliver a profitable crowd-pleaser. It takes but a glance at the film today to see that Welles’ evaluation is untrustworthy. The Stranger shows as much of the director’s baroque visual signature as Touch of Evil; as with almost all of his post-Citizen Kane films, its areas of conventionality and compromise (i.e. the streamlined, one-track plot, the bland, programmatic score) bear studio fingerprints.

Director Frank Cwiklik’s stage adaptation of The Stranger wipes away the prints, fulfilling much of the material’s bizarre promise that Welles was too busy repairing a career to mind. This tale of a Nazi war criminal hiding out in Connecticut is like listening to the film play on TV while half-asleep. Much of the original’s structure and dialogue are intact, only filtered through a weird dream haze. Oblique voice-overs double as exposition and subconscious-probing atmosphere. Cwiklik fills his stage, basically a small black box, with constantly shifting shards, pools and fingers of light. His dynamic blocking evokes the crazed compositions in Welles’ Kafka nightmare The Trial. It’s an often mesmerizing design.

Of course, design only carries us so far. In what was roughly the first act of Welles’ The Stranger, Cwiklik builds an exciting air of intrigue as repentant ex-Nazi Meinike (Tom Reid) travels the continents in search of fellow war criminal Franz Kindler (Peter Brown). Using sound effects, voices, recorded music and a few folding chairs, Cwiklik imposes the sensation of travel, of a transformed postwar world in a sudden, nervous scramble. Allied War Crimes inspector Wilson (producer Michelle Schlossberg, in a role played in the film by Edward G. Robinson) shadows Meinike. Clandestine meetings, violent sneak attacks and interrogations play out under Cwiklik’s terrified lighting. The trail ends in Connecticut, where Kindler has changed his name and is set to marry into an elite New England family.

At this point, The Stranger promises to get even stranger and more provocative, but it doesn’t. Once the play settles on Wilson’s investigation, Cwiklik relies more heavily on his actors and the dialogue-propelled plot. Much of Cwiklik’s cast is simply too stiff. Suddenly, the dream atmosphere evaporates, and we’re staring at yet another patchy experimental play. Typical of what goes wrong is Sarah Jane Bunker’s performance as Kindler’s unsuspecting wife. She reacts to the news of her husband’s Nazi past with a shrill tantrum. Little of the horror and paranoia in Cwiklik’s design surfaces in the performances.

Two important exceptions are Brown’s turn as Kindler and Reid’s as Meinike. Brown, whose thin build and sorrowful presence are reminiscent of a silent movie actor, is believable as a man who speaks fondly of genocide during a pleasant dinner party while retaining his wife’s unquestioning love. Reid, who is at once frail and imposing in trench coat, fedora and thick plastic glasses, is the kind of wounded monster Fritz Lang might dream up.

By dressing all of the American characters in white shirts and black slacks or skirts, Cwiklik means to say something about the country’s dawning Cold War vigilance and conformity. But he seems to have left his actors to fend for themselves–as if all they need to do is hit their marks. As Welles understood, technical brilliance is not quite enough.