Sherman Offers A Classic Tour De Force With A New Twist

By Julie Stern

SHERMAN — Those of a certain age cannot hear the title Wait Until Dark without immediately flashing back to the Sixties movie in which Audrey Hepburn, as the gallant blind girl, is menaced by Alan Arkin as the evil psychopath. The moment where the refrigerator light goes on and the whole theater gasps…

But before it was a movie it was a stage play by Fredrick Knott, and it is this stage play that is now on the boards at the Sherman Playhouse, under the very competent direction of Bruce Thomson.

For those who don’t know the story, it revolves around a musical doll, filled with heroin, that was given to an unsuspecting Greenwich Village photographer in order to smuggle it across the border from Canada. Sam Hendrix, the unwitting courier, was asked to bring it to a child in a New York Hospital. Before it can be retrieved by the drug dealers, however, Sam manages to lose the doll.

The sinister bad guy, Harry Roat, murders the woman who gave Sam the doll, thinking she is holding out on him; then he hires a pair of newly paroled conmen to bluff their way into the apartment and convince Sam’s wife to give it to them.

Sam’s wife Susy is blind, and it seems like it should be no problem for the two of them to gain access. One, Mike Talman, poses as an old Marine buddy of Sam’s, while the other pretends to be a policeman, Sergeant Carlino, investigating the murder.

Using a phone booth on the corner as their center of operations, and signaling with the blinds over the sink, Carlino and Roat keep finding new reasons to come to the apartment, while Mike stays inside to give Susy “moral support.” (Sam has been conveniently sent on a series of wild goose chases to keep him away until they can find the doll which they are sure must be hidden somewhere in the apartment). But if Talman and Carlino don’t get the job done quickly, the murderous Roat intends to use other, crueler means to get what he wants.

Based on the original set design of George Jenkins, the Sherman stage crew has created a highly realistic grubby old-fashioned Greenwich Village kitchen: the claustrophobic world in which Susy, blinded in an accident a year ago, is imprisoned.

The drama of this classic thriller revolves around the dramatic irony, wherein the audience is all too aware of the menace Susy can’t see, and the seemingly insurmountable nature of the odds stacked against her.

However helpless she may appear, Susy can hear, and she can think, and she can marshal her resources, including removing the fuses so that when night comes, the playing field in the kitchen will be a little more level.

Director Thomson has assembled what he calls “the cast from heaven” and they do go through their paces with spirit and skill. Susan Abrams is both feisty and scared as Susy; Eric S. Smith radiates both charm and a reluctant decency as Mike Talman; Gary McNerney is his bone-headed partner, the hard-nosed “cop”; and Michael Toone has fun with the part of the chillingly sadistic Roat.

An extremely good job is also done by Marilyn Hubbell as Gloria, the ten-year-old upstairs neighbor-brat  who alternates between helping Susy with chores and tormenting her with “tricks” as a way of dealing with problems in her own life. When things start to heat up, Gloria rises to the occasion…

This is a great show to take the kids to, if you don’t mind keeping them out until eleven. For someone who’s never seen it before, Wait Until Dark is a tour de force of suspense, and even if you have seen it, the Sherman production is very well done, and it even includes an original twist.