Jill Vice sheds light on noir in ‘Fatal Step’
If you love film noir — the chiaroscuro of the lighting, the high melodrama, the grisly climaxes, the argot of “dames” and “schmucks” — you’ve probably come to notice that the genre’s protagonists, its voice-over-spouting gumshoes and reporters, almost always happen to be men.
Enter Jill Vice, whose noir solo show “A Fatal Step” puts a woman at the center of the action. Her femme fatale is Sarah, a schemer hoping to reignite the dimming passions of her boyfriend, Frank. And at the show’s Thursday, Jan. 25, opening at the Marsh, Vice didn’t so much enter as make an entrance Norma Desmond would approve of — a soundtrack of stentorian minor chords; an
accent from the era when every female movie star had to sound like Katharine Hepburn; the vampy poses of a wanton damsel in distress; a great, heaving pause before a single, breathily intoned word: “Murder!”
If you’re coming just for the camp, for a loving send-up of a favorite genre’s idiosyncrasies, Vice both does noir justice and impishly picks it apart. A sequence spoofing “Vertigo” is worth the price of admission alone, as is a parade of icky foot jokes (Frank is a podiatrist), as is a scene that improbably yet triumphantly marries a classic noir vendetta murder with a Betty Friedan quote, all told by a character with a surfer’s intonation.
Directed by Mark Kenward, Vice doesn’t always segue distinctly from one voice to another, particularly in the 65-minute show’s first scenes. In a few instances, it’s as if she has one foot in the character she’s shedding and another in the one she’s donning. But as “A Fatal Step” progresses, transitions sharpen, and Vice’s range comes into astonishing focus. She transforms from a photographer whose squatting stride conjures an enormous girth to an invalid whose jaw seems to recede into the back of her skull to, in Frank, a ringer for Jimmy Stewart, particularly in her substitution of an “sh” sound for that of an “s.”
It’s easy to rollick along with Vice when she exaggerates noir tropes, like that of the saintly female foil to the femme fatale, whose tears, in “A Fatal Step,” are like holy water. But Vice’s project isn’t caricature alone. She also endeavors to flesh out archetypes, to give complicated feelings to characters who, in original noir, can seem little more than set pieces, there for the aesthetics or the atmosphere, not because they’re real people. It’s a worthy goal; and moving toward it, Vice offers a transcendent insight: that the twin capacities to desire, and to despair in desire’s lack of fulfillment, are what makes a character grow from two dimensions to three.
But only sometimes do Vice and Kenward find the right tone when venturing out of purely comic territory. They’re so confident in their laughs, and deservedly so, that you wish they could own with equal poise their leaps out of parody into their most daring, original material.
You also might find yourself wishing that Sarah would see that Frank isn’t interesting enough to deserve her. But without a woman who needs a man, without a woman getting punished for her desires, would there be any noir left to lampoon?