CadyTech home

Dumas home

Altarena's sci-fi mystery is a success

By Tom Billings
THEATER CRITIC

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO "COMMUNICATING DOORS," the adult sci-fi mystery thriller now at Altarena Playhouse, features Sondra Putnam, left, as the aghast second Mrs. Reece Wells, Ruella. Chris Pflueger as Reece and Mary Samson as Jessica.

"Communicating Doors" at Altarena Playhouse is a fascinating and delightful sci-fi mystery thriller. Alan Ayckbourn's intricately convoluted fantasy masterpiece is sometimes confusing but continuously spellbinding and, in the end, it all makes satisfying sense, more or less.

Publicity for the show suggests that owing to "adult themes" it may not be suitable for children. But apart from the blue wig worn by one of the principals, there's nothing astonishingly different from what can be seen routinely on daytime television or "Dr. Who." Youngsters too young to understand won't be fazed. Youngsters old enough to understand are apt to be a bit blasé. In any event, a good time is likely to be had by all.

The play takes place in one or two or even three (depending on how you look at them) identical suites in a posh London hotel where the hotel owner, Reece Wells, likes to spend his wedding nights. Some slight confusion here has more to do with time than with place. Parts of the show occur in 1974, 1994, and 2014, but involve a single set of characters who travel among those dates via a closet rather than a conventional time machine.

As the play begins in 2014, Reece, decrepit in his terminal years, has asked his villainous henchman, Julian, to procure a woman. She turns out to be Poopay (nee Phoebe) Dayseer, a dominatrix, who explains she's not a prostitute but a "specialist sexual consultant," as only the British might put it.

Reece isn't interested in the woman for the usual reasons. He needs someone to witness his confession finally setting the record straight about his lifetime of horrendous misdeeds. When Julian, who was the actual perpetrator of most of those misdeeds, gets wind of Reece's intention, he determines to destroy the confession and Poopay along with it, just in case she's read it.

Poopay hides in the closet, and when she emerges, the room seems the same but it's 1984 and she's confronting Ruella, Reece's second wife, on the morning of the day she's slated to be murdered by Julian at Reece's behest. It takes a while for the women to figure it all out, but they decide to use the closet to go back another 10 years and try to communicate with Reece's first wife, Jessica, on their wedding night. Her subsequent death, it now seems clear, was also murder, not an accident.

The hope is that if Jessica can be persuaded to do something different, it might change the whole course of future events, perhaps sparing both her own life and Ruella's as well. Predictably, Jessica is incredulous and summons Harold, the house detective. As a last resort, just before Harold give her the bum's rush, Ruella pens a note, seals it in an envelope, and hands it to Jessica with the earnest entreaty it not be opened for a year.

What was in the note, how Jessica responded to it, whether the course of future events was thereby altered and, if so, how they were altered, keeps the audience's attention fairly riveted during act two, and it's not giving away too much to add there are a number of surprises, both plausible and improbable.

Directed by the masterful hand of Robert Hamm, the cast turns in a series of excellent performances, with several actors portraying the same character at widely different ages. Chris Pflueger is so credibly doddering as the aged Reece it's difficult to realize he's also the virile young Reece. C. Conrad Cady similarly metamorphoses as the truly villainous Julian, and so does Benjamin Privitt as Harold, the ubiquitous detective.

Although Sondra Putnam as Ruella, Kim Kensington as Poopay, and Mary Samson as Jessica also do their fair share of time traveling, time is kinder to them and they remain forever young, vibrant, and enormously attractive. All of their portrayals are excellently credible, a non-trivial feat considering the incredibility of the story line.

Much of the credit for the success of this production goes to technical director Don Bialik, not merely for the ingenious working time machine he created, but also for the setting and, especially, for the lighting that makes the production come alive. He is ably assisted by Deborah Robbins and by stage manager Madge Grahn and costumer Maggi Oakley.