Tamica Katzmann
Photo credit James Bowling
WILMINGTON, NC – How do you sell an in-joke to an audience? On paper, this should be the issue dogging any production of The 39 Steps.
The first thing that struck me about this play is how specific a comedy it is, a spoof of the sort of British espionage mysteries that were popular during the mid and post-war periods. A genre that slowly fell out of fashion with the arrival of James Bond. Today, they are mostly associated with Alfred Hitchcock. Building your satire around a genre that hasn’t been popular since the 50’s is risky, almost as risky as staging it. I found myself wondering what tricks Big Dawg Productions had up their sleeve to pull this off. Simply put, this play cannot only be funny for people who get the references and inside jokes, there must be other dimensions to the humor. In effect, it has to be more than a spoof.
In The 39 Steps, we follow our protagonist Richard Hannay (Chad Hsu) as he gets caught up in a plot to smuggle British military secrets out of the country into the hands of a foreign government. Additionally, Hannay has been framed for a murder he didn’t commit and on the run from the police while he tries to solve the mystery.
“Frantic” is the word I would best use to describe Big Dawg’s staging of The 39 Steps. For a two-hour long play, it’s remarkable how fast it felt, partially because the lean thriller structure (while employed for comic effect) facilitates a plot that is always in motion. Most of the action on stage was literally Hannay running from one plot beat or comic set piece to another, with the rest of the cast in pursuit. It’s a physically demanding piece and the production leans into this, adding extra physicality in the form of slapstick comedy.
Director Randy Davis, who played one of the supporting characters in a previous production of The 39 Steps, guides this relentless frantic forward motion. The production also had a great laugh at the expense of its own limitations, favoring a minimalist set with numerous pieces of scenery that double as props when the need arose. There’s an unspoken understanding that the audience isn’t here to be fully immersed in the play’s imaginary world, but to get caught up in the complicated, comic dance of scenery and props as the story races from a London apartment to the Scottish moors and back again. One expertly realized gag involved Hannay being pursued across the moors by an airplane. The costumes are just as flexible as the sets and the lighting and sound design only call attention to themselves when they are needed to bump a scene from merely ‘humorous’ to ‘hysterical’. The best is the running joke involving a sound effect that comes up whenever the titular ’39 steps’ are mentioned by one of the characters. It sounds simple, but the way it played out had me in tears.
None of this would be possible without the cast, composed only of four actors playing a cast of hundreds. Heather Setzler and Ben Thomas-Reid are credited as “Clown 1” and “Clown 2” and their jobs are to play the entire supporting cast. They performed some of the flashiest work happening on stage, wild costume changes, purposefully terrible accents and some of the best scenery acrobatics. One of my favorite bits was when they leaped out of a window by picking up a window frame and pulling it down over themselves. They made a hilarious comic duo and are a delight to watch. Tamica Katzmann plays all three (yes, three) of Hannay’s love interests. She also had her fair degree of slapstick. She was as frantic as everyone else, but her particular brand of wizardry was finding three different ways to be done with Hannay’s shenanigans.
Which brings us to Chad Hsu as Richard Hannay, our beleaguered protagonist, who is the first of our principal cast to appear noticeably sweaty. Hsu played Hannay as a self-centered idiot, in way over his head and yet somehow finding ways to make it worse. It would be inaccurate to say that all of Hannay’s woes are self-inflicted, but he certainly doesn’t help matters and often picks the least practical way to get out of a situation. Hsu brought a sincerity to the performance that helped sell the character. By the end of the play, it’s hard to tell who is more tired, Hsu or Hannay.
Big Dawg’s The 39 Steps is one of those comedies that leaves you still laughing to yourself long after the curtain closes. Despite the complete lack of a fourth wall, it felt more like being invited into the madcap world of the play than just watching it. It’s hard not to have a good time when the cast and crew are clearly having this much fun.
Big Dawg Productions’ The 39 Steps continues at the Ruth & Bucky Stein Studio Theatre through September 8. See our calendar for details.
