Spider's Web
This talky Agatha Christie mystery is long but serves up an amusing little puzzle
Reviewed by Elizabeth Cobbe, Fri., July 9, 2010
Spider's Web
The Vortex, 2307 Manor Rd., 478-5282
Through July 24
Running time: 2 hr., 45 min.
Agatha Christie wrote a lot of plays, and she wrote a lot of novels. Her books exemplify what is now referred to as the "cozy," a mystery with which you can curl up in an armchair
with a pot of tea and a kitty without worrying about coming across the detailed remains of burn victims and how to identify them, à la Patricia Cornwell.
For the stage, that means that Christie did not write the kind of plays that Samuel Beckett or Peter Handke did. But then, The Mousetrap is still running in London after more than 50 years, and Different Stages' production of Spider's Web played to a sold-out crowd on opening night. A lot of people really enjoy the logical puzzle of an Agatha Christie play, where the clues are presented one by one and the audience is given a fair shot at guessing the murderer.
It's also amusing to note how Spider's Web reflects certain social prejudices of mid-century England. True, there may be a dead body in the living room, but of utmost importance is protecting the reputation of the man of the house and his work with the Foreign Office. The antics and stories of his wife, Clarissa (Nikki Zook), make for such finger-wagging nonsense as she scrambles to make the best of a messy situation. Time and again, the main characters with their upper-crust class status come just shy of patting the servants and working-class characters on the head as they patronizingly accept that, "Oh, yes, well, I suppose you ought to investigate this murder, if it's so very important to you."
With Zook as Clarissa, the play comes together at its best. She strikes an engaging balance between comedy and dismay (at the murder or at the state of the sitting room, depending on the moment). Her carefully coiffed hairdo and the full skirts of her costume (designed by Emily Cavasar) add to the warm yet refined appeal of the character and the play. As her former guardian Sir Rowland Delahaye, Craig Kanne also finds moments for subtle comedy.
Now, there is one thing that's troublesome about the production, and it's something having to do with technique. Spider's Web is, for an American theatre company, a dialect play. Dialects are hard. And while I'm no expert, it's painful to hear the ability to render a credible dialect dribble away the further down the cast list you go, and perhaps even more discouraging to see some actors play the accent rather than develop any real character. It's only one detail, but it's one that jolts you out of the play every time someone who can't dependably muster an elongated vowel opens his or her mouth.
Under the joint direction of Jeanette Bellemeur and TJ Moreno, the staging is static, and this talky, talky, talky play runs long, even with actors speeding through many of their lines. At the same time, it's good to consider the aims of the play: to amuse the audience and to provide a little puzzle and something to talk about. In this, Spider's Web certainly succeeds.
