BWW Reviews: Fountain Hills Theater's NIGHT WATCH Is A Tightly Wound Riddle!

Nothing is as it seems in the mildly amusing and riddlesome mystery, Night Watch by Lucille Fletcher, now on stage at Fountain Hills Theater. Director Peter J. Hill knows what his audiences like and has served up a nifty and suspenseful brain-teaser for them to mull over, aiming at times more for farce and caricature than for dark and dramatic intensity.

Elaine Wheeler (Amy Serafin) and her husband John (Matthew Cary) reside in an upscale and lavishly appointed townhouse (kudos to Hill's team for an extraordinary set!) in Kips Bay, Manhattan. As the play opens, the insomniac and pacing heiress pierces the night with an ear-splitting shriek that brings John, her good friend and houseguest Blanche (Aimee Gajate), and Helga the maid (Diane Senffner) rushing to her side. She claims to have seen a dead, presumably murdered, body in the abandoned tenement building across the way. The problem is, gee whiz, that the subsequent investigation by the police ~ officer Vanelli (J.P. Clemente) who appears to be more interested in the Wheeler's Picasso and Modigliani than clues and Lieutenant Walker (Tom Vinopal), bemoaning a city overridden with crime and crank calls ~ fails to turn up a body or any evidence of a crime. Elaine's subsequent frantic calls to the police and her report of a second dead body in the same tenement ~ again a dead end ~ destroy her credibility. You know, you can only cry "wolf" so many times!

So, is Elaine's depression over the loss eight years earlier of her husband Carl in a tragic car accident that crushed not only her spouse but her belief in his fidelity causing her to see things that go bump in the night? Is she experiencing eidetic images, according to the shrink, Dr, Tracey Lake (Joy Bingham Strimple), brought in to assess Elaine's apparently fragile state of mind, visual evocations of past incidents? Or is Elaine, being set up, driven to vulnerability and madness by unknown enemies who plant reminders of past horrors? Is it possible that one or more of the quirky characters, including an enigmatic next door neighbor (Mark Burkett) and a deli owner (Matt Mcdonald), who rotate in and out of the apartment are in on the plot?

No spoilers in this review! You have to wait until the intensely climactic end, with its multiple twists, to find out whodunit ~ and why!

Betrayal is at the heart of this play, which, by the footnote way, was adapted into a darker Grand Guignol-style film in 1973, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey. Lucille Fletcher meets Rear Window meets Gaslight!

Night Watch continues its run through October 19th.

Photo credit to Patty Torrilhon.

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