‘A Devil Inside’ is a fitting end for Pittsburgh Playhouse
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
For the final professional stage production at the grand and ramshackle old Pittsburgh Playhouse, soon to be deserted for new digs Downtown, the powers that be at Playhouse Rep clearly scanned their libraries in puzzlement. What could live up to the occasion?
You might think they’d turn to a classical tragedy, or maybe one of those light comedies from the Playhouse glory days of the 1950s. But for this new millennium, they opted instead for the whole kit and caboodle, a ramshackle, post-modern mix of comedy and tragedy — in their extreme forms, farce and melodrama — plus detective story, Russian angst, some slice-’em-up and a dollop of the absurd, served up with lots of noir.
In other words, they exchanged their own puzzlement for ours, serving up David Lindsay-Abaire’s “A Devil Inside,” which keeps the audience happily guessing through two hours of comic-gory mayhem.
If you think you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry, you have, because its bits and pieces will be familiar, maybe especially if you once read “Anna Karenina.” Mr. Lindsay-Abaire is a cunning cook, and he keeps surprising and delighting his audience with each new serving.
The time is back when there were Yellow Pages and Radio Shacks. The backstory includes a bloody murder 14 years before, but we hear of many other oddities, mostly also connecting back to that date in the Poconos and to a Russian literature class taught by a charismatic professor, and that’s only a sketch of it. You can’t imagine where it’s all going to go, so settle in for the comic duration, and be prepared for stage blood along the way.
For this swansong, Playhouse Rep has enlisted a great cast of six, full of Playhouse history itself. The older generation is represented by Terry Wickline, playing a ditsy mother with a jar full of body parts, and Philip Winters, delivering an increasingly hysterical (in both senses) lecture on “Crime and Punishment” that prefigures his own midnight obsessions.
The younger generation is made up of Cav (aka Kevin) O’Leary and Hayley Nielsen as two students. He bears the burden of his mother’s fixations and his own hapless love with delicious deadpan. She drives herself from besotted groupie to Russian tragic wannabe — kudos to costume designer Anthony James Sirk, who dresses her imaginatively every step of the way.
In between are Michael Fuller and Daina Michelle Griffith. He’s an apparent nobody, a Mr. Fixit with weird dreams who gets to do some extraordinary physical comedy, and she’s a Woman with a Past shacked up in his back room with a demon in her gut, but of course they are both much more complicated even than that.
Making just enough sense, but not too much, of Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s snarl of a story is director Kim Martin. As long-time Playhouse production manager and now producing director, she has come to know well the frustrating but beloved old place, cobbled together out of three buildings plus generations of spit, tape and spackle. That experience has prepared her well for managing the equally convoluted structure of “A Devil Inside.”
Ms. Martin is given a hefty assist not only by Mr. Sirk’s costumes and the performing sound and lights of Steve Shapiro and Andrew David Ostrowski, but especially by the stuffstrewn set by Tucker Topel. A lot of attics and garages were ransacked to furnish this amalgam of laundromat, fix-it shop, lecture hall, highway and mountainside. I loved the berserk automobile.
And did I say the play also includes a backstory of cops corrupted by coffee and crullers, plus a New York apocalypse?
What must the Playhouse ghosts be thinking? If they’re like me, they’re admiring the actors and having a nutsy good time. Senior theater critic: Christopher Rawson: 412216-1944.