George Jack as Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock Blonde. Photo by Erin Bell / Bull City Photography
DURHAM, NC – It’s tempting to call British playwright Terry Johnson‘s time-shifting drama, Hitchcock Blonde, an intellectual thriller for film fans and be done with it. It’s built, after all, on the movie lore surrounding the legendary – and problematic – director still universally known, nearly 50 years after his last work, as the Master of Suspense. (That’s particularly so since actor George Jack‘s arch impersonation of the imperious auteur, under Ruth Berry’s direction, is clearly one of this production’s guiltier pleasures.)
Was Hitchcock “the first man who knew what the cinema would become,” as Alex, a media studies scholar at a university in the U.K., puts it here? Is his work “an expression of misogyny so extreme, yet so precise, that…it pre-augurs four decades of butchery to come,” (as of 2002, when Johnson wrote the play) as Alex’s student, Jennifer, concludes? Could both, ultimately, the case?
Either way, more is going on here than a cinematic detective story attempting to unravel a prominent idée fixe in film studies: Hitchcock’s increasingly odious and abusive obsession with a string of blonde actresses including Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren, over his 50-year career.
The start of the fall semester was a particularly appropriate time for Brave New Classics to stage a work in which a college professor emotionally manipulates a bright, attractive and vulnerable young student into a sexual relationship, one whose attraction quickly fades – at least for the prof – shortly thereafter. When this happens in real life – and it has happened in the Triangle, among practitioners in stand-up comedy, theater and dance who’ve gone public in recent years – those Hitchcockian webs of intrigue and deceit so compelling on screen have derailed lives, ended careers, closed companies and effectively cut short the promise of a number of young artists.
As it turns, that cautionary tale also plays out among the three relationships, marked by similar imbalances of power, which Johnson probes as he stitches back and forth between three different eras in this imaginative drama. The work begins in 1999, when Alex and Jennifer, who joins him on a summer internship on an island in Greece, examine the severely damaged remains of a previously undiscovered film that Hitchcock worked on at the start of his career in 1919.
The playwright then jumps to 1959, where a rough-edged woman known only as The Blonde, a body double used for the shower scene in Psycho, chafes at three things: Hitchcock’s odd demands, her marriage to an abusive spouse (Ryan McDaniel) and remaining a professional unknown. (Historically, the fact that Psycho had a body double was a secret kept for years after the film’s release, along with her identity – a Los Angeles showgirl and men’s magazine model named Marli Renfro.)
After Hitchcock rather disingenuously tells the Blonde in an unconventional job interview that nudity is needed in the shower scene to create “empathy,” he comes down to cases. He plans to create in the scene “the illusion that…any ordinary woman…watching this entertainment…could be…that women are…stabbed. Occasionally. And repeatedly. […] Women stab once. Men stab repeatedly. Which, my dear, is a clue.“
Among these shifts in time, we catch glimpses from 1919: individual photographic frames, projected on the stage’s back scrim, of a woman in Hitchcock’s unfinished film, which Alex and Jennifer scrutinize to ingeniously suss out the story being told. These take place before a projected sequence from the final reel, filmed for this production by McDaniel and featuring cameos by actors Dylan Bailey and Kelly McDaniel, accidentally discloses the story taking place off-screen, including the fateful origin of the Hitchcock Blonde. (Ryan McDaniel also filmed the show’s eye-popping opening credits, a worthy homage to designer Saul Bass’s opening credits for Psycho.)
In each of these eras, the women resist the men’s varying efforts to cast them in their fantasies, on-screen and off. Teal Lepley, a sharp young actor who’s just now coming into her own, brings snark and savvy to Jennifer, the budding young film scholar who’s becoming increasingly aware of the uneasy parallels between her partnership with Alex and the earlier liaisons here. “The point is, am I what I am, or am I what you say I am,” she asks her would-be Pygmalion. “You can’t just enjoy the bits you approve of and reinvent the rest of me.”
In a career-best performance, Jason Christ invests Alex’s legitimate passions as a film theorist and the manipulative interpersonal games he runs, with a vulnerability and world-weariness that hints at why both are a part of him.
After the cringe-fest of Alex wheedling Jennifer for intimacy – or lacking that, some pity sex – Lepley’s character fixes him with a look of utter disbelief before asking, “Does this ever work?” When the laughs finally subside, an abashed Alex replies, “Never tried it before.”
Jason Christ and Teal Lepley in Hitchcock Blonde. Photo by Erin Bell / Bull City Photography
Noelle Azarelo‘s drop-dead take on The Blonde rendered a street-wise belle dame sans merci who’s nonetheless trapped in her own manipulative relationships. When she wasn’t kicking the hornets’ nest of her relationship with her criminally underscripted husband, she was equally unsubtle in her exchanges with Hitchcock, asking if he was titillated while filming her nude scene. When she gets nowhere with that, for future reference she then consults the master of onscreen murders for some expert pointers on human knifework and the subsequent disposal of bodies, to keep the evening from being a total loss. Throughout all, Berry and Azarelo probe the self-loathing of a woman caught in a double-bind, drawn to abusive men she truly hates.
But these and other notable acting achievements are compromised by vague, threadbare set design and lackluster lighting that inadequately defined and isolated the various eras and locations in the play. These were particularly jarring after the crisp, professional-level design witnessed in Ryan McDaniel’s opening credits.
Berry touches on the skeevy creepiness of Hitchcock’s joke that isn’t a joke when he calls the Blonde on her sex-based machinations. Her direction also gave Lepler the nuances needed for Jennifer to find the key that releases her from the manipulative labyrinth here.
But that character is cheated when Berry and Lepler don’t fully investigate the wounded parts of Jennifer’s past in the script, and leave those dimensions underdeveloped on stage. Berry actually came closer with Christ in fully unmasking the damage and profound loneliness in Alex’s past that drives both his love of film and his deep-seated need to protect himself. Jennifer deserved the same degree of knowing, and acknowledgement.
The main thing we’d wish for the director is the courage to fully explore with her actors and invest more moments with the sharp honesty we see when the Blonde momentarily pierces Hitchcock’s trademark sangfroid. When she does, it’s not a straight razor or a butcher knife that leaves him screaming, “CUT! CUT!!” A simple, human touch undoes Hitchcock – and at least two more relationships here as well.
In keeping with the subject matter, ultimately, a knife discerns, as Ogun, the Yoruban deity of warriors and blacksmiths might remind us. It divides fruit from stem, food from offal – and the living from the dead.
So does a good director. Such insights, and better help in production design, may help Berry more fully realize her already intriguing visions of darkness and light.
