Sidekick becomes detective in ‘Holmes and Watson’

We know that after seemingly plunging to his death at Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock Holmes would be back, saved by readers clamoring for more from the world’s greatest detective.

But all that’s still ahead for the loyal Watson we meet at the beginning of “Holmes and Watson,” yet another Jeffrey Hatcher play being staged by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater under Joseph Hanreddy’s direction. Like Hatcher’s tedious “Armadale” — mounted by the Rep a decade ago — it’s a lot of plot and not much payoff.

Things begin when Watson (Norman Moses) receives a telegram from a doctor (Mark Corkins) running a Scottish insane asylum and indicating that three of his inmates are each claiming to be Sherlock Holmes.

Sure, it’s a bit suspect that Watson can’t immediately identify his best friend, in a play that manufactures suspense on this point for most of its 80 intermission-free minutes.

But as Watson told us upon viewing a typically top-notch Holmes disguise in the superb “A Scandal in Bohemia” — one of two Holmes stories inspiring Hatcher’s play — “the stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.”

So which of the three would-be Sherlocks are impostors?

The first and most acerbic (Ryan Imhoff) most closely resembles the classic Holmes. The second and most extroverted (Grant Goodman) more closely resembles a bearded Christ. The third (Rex Young) has a shaved head and is apparently deaf, dumb and blind.

Assisted by a menacing orderly (Eric Damon Smith) and a creepy matron (Maggie Kettering), Corkins’ slightly sinister doctor keeps this trio in line. But it’s up to Watson to tell us who these three are.

That mystery gets explained near play’s end, in the course of a protracted reveal that’s often more clunky than clever, requiring convoluted and not always convincing exposition that slows the action to a crawl.

What’s missing is any explanation of the psychology of these characters and what makes them tick.

Why might the mad choose to impersonate Holmes, and what does this tell us about Holmes himself? What does it mean to be trapped within a story? What if the stories Watson has written are hagiography rather than true — a topic briefly raised and then dropped? Most intriguingly, just why is Holmes so fascinated by Irene Adler, the woman who bested him in “Bohemia”?

There’ll be no plumbing of such depths in this safe and bland show; what we’re given is an abstract puzzle rather than flesh-and-blood people. Hanreddy’s veteran cast – all doing good work here – make the most of what little they’re given. But much like the video projections whisking Watson to Scotland, they’re forced to cover a lot of ground while only skimming the surface.