Review: A New REAR WINDOW Premieres at Hartford Stage Company

Hartford Stage's new adaptation of REAR WINDOW is an exercise in style, full of spectacular visuals that exploit theatrical technology, as well as being a significant reworking of a famous story for our time. And it offers a celebrity sighting: Kevin Bacon in the role made famous by Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's thriller, based on the same source material. So the production's been sold out for weeks with only a few seats and standing room being released day by day. Good luck getting in!

What hits first is the style: muscular brass in an original sound design by Jane Shaw underscores an opening montage of projections (designed by Sean Nieuwenhuis) against a scrim that rises to reveal a shallow apartment with windows along the back wall. That wall will split and open to reveal the backside of a three story brick apartment house, with windows giving onto nine distinct apartments. As the story unfolds all this machinery--including, eventually, a turntable for a section of the apartment building--will get a real workout.

Scenic Designer Alexander Dodge has boundless imagination (I'll never forget his shockingly green circular maze of a set for TWELFTH NIGHT at Hartford Stage) and is undaunted by technical challenges. It makes sense that he grew up at Taliesin West, architect Frank Lloyd Wright's institute in Arizona. He's worked with director Darko Tresnjak on other projects, including A GENTLEMAN'S GUIDE TO MURDER, which garnered him his second Tony nomination, KISS ME KATE, and, most recently, THE GHOSTS OF VERSAILLES for L.A. Opera. Their teamwork is bold and seamless. Here, they've converted Hartford's thrust house into a proscenium theater and then gone vertical to the max. It makes for a very flat staging, but all nine apartments in the back house are playing spaces, each occupied by a busy ensemble that plays out their own story lines weaving around the main action of the plot.

That plot is loosely based in Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder" (as is the famous Hitchcock film) but with significant nods to Woolrich's complex biography. One of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters for films noir during the 1940s, he was also a closeted gay man and an alcoholic. After a brief failed marriage he lived with his mother in New York, and, after her death, withdrew from much social contact. Repeated bouts with a foot infection starting as early as 1925 eventually led to gangrene and amputation and he became housebound; he died in 1968.

Playwright Keith Reddin has reshaped this material in ways that differ significantly from the Hitchcock film, adding complexity around both homosexuality and race. It's these changes that give the production new dramatic content worthy of our attention. So the show is not only fun to watch but calls upon the audience to think.

In the short story, but entirely absent from the film, the central character has a 'houseman' named Sam, who is black. That role is essential in Reddin's script, and carried with dignity and subtlety by McKinley Belcher III. In the original short story, Sam has worked for Hal Jeffries for 10 years. In the play, their relationship is brand new, and tinged with sexual tension. Sam, who has a winning way about him when wheedling a job out of Jeffries, tenses up visibly when the police show up, and Detective Boyne (John Bedford Lloyd) is blatantly and casually racist in ways that resonate with our present-day issues around police behavior toward black people. Moreover, Reddin has found ways to weave in reference to a horrendous and historic miscarriage of justice in 1944: the execution of George Stinney, a black 14 year old.

Hitchcock, who was famously obsessed with beautiful blondes, replaces Sam with a girlfriend, played in the film by Grace Kelly, despite the fact that there is no such character in the short story--really, no women at all aside from those observed across the way. By contrast, the play version constructs a confusing overlap between Jeffries' memories of his departed wife with the woman who he deduces has been murdered. Played by the same actor (Melinda Page Hamilton), the costuming and projections suggest that part of what enables Jeffries to figure out what happened across the way are drunken hallucinations or fever dreams. This is where the storytelling of the play was the hardest to follow, for me.

Kevin Bacon, hobbled by a cast on one leg up to the knee, is remarkably kinetic despite that. His physical quickness at certain moments is balanced by vocal energy that only occasionally drops into his lowest range. He's quite adept at remaining understandable without forced projection or exaggerated enunciation. From his first entrance, hopping on one foot while zipping up his fly and smoking a cigarette, he projects agitation throughout that contrasts markedly with the aura of calm that is part of Jimmy Stewart's persona, just under the surface even in this part.

I recommend this show to people who like convoluted mysteries and showmanship: there's plenty of both. And comparing three versions of this tale (Woolrich's story "It Had to Be Murder," Hitchcock's classic film, and the Tresnjak/Reddin/Dodge production) provides fascinating insight into how narrative is slippery and malleable.

REAR WINDOW runs through November 15 in Hartford.

photo credit: Joan Marcus

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