Theater: ‘Wait Until Dark’ still scary after all these years

Wait Until Dark will walk you down a blind alley and then scare the daylights out of you.

This famous stage thriller from 1966 about a sightless woman menaced by a band of cruel and conniving criminals, which opened at Stage West on Saturday, was written by Frederick Knott, who also authored Dial M for Murder.

This production, however, utilizes a recent adaptation of Knott’s script by Jeffrey Hatcher. So those familiar with the original or the film version starring Audrey Hepburn might notice some differences, including moving the time setting from the 1960s to the 1940s, and adding a few four-letter words you never heard Hepburn utter.

But those cosmetic changes, fortunately, do not mess with the key elements of this taut drama. It will still keep you on the edge of your seat, whether you know the piece or not.

The action is set entirely in the Greenwich Village apartment of Susan (Dana Schultes) and her photographer husband, Sam (David Wilson-Brown). Through an unlikely series of events, Sam has unwittingly come into possession of a doll stuffed with valuable contraband. In the play’s opening scene, we meet the bad guys, Roat (Mark Shum) and Carlino (Thomas Ward), who have followed the doll’s trail to the innocent couple’s apartment. They are methodically building a plot to trick Susan into revealing the whereabouts of the sought-after doll. And it is clear that the pair is willing to commit murder to achieve their ends.

After the miscreants set their plan in motion by luring Sam away from the apartment with a fake photo assignment, Susan receives an unexpected visit from one of Sam’s old buddies from his Marines days, Mike (Jake Buchanan). When Susan becomes suspicious of the highly theatrical shenanigans of Carlino and Roat, she enlists Mike’s aid in figuring out what is going on. He is pretty much her only choice since she does not trust the neighbor , Gloria (Cate Stuart), whom Sam has enlisted to aid Susan when he is away at work.

What happens next is an epic battle between light and darkness, played out in the claustrophobic confines of a New York apartment.

This production, directed with a cold-blooded breeziness by Jim Covault, crackles with tension and talent. Schultes, who also serves as executive producer at Stage West, carries the show so well and so consistently that you will want to buy her a seeing-eye dog when it is over. But the men also rise to the occasion, and keep pace with her at every turn. Shum and Ward are every bit as repugnant as they ought to be. And Buchanan handles his nuanced role adroitly.

Their efforts are complemented by a highly detailed set designed by Clare Floyd Devries. Her work is especially important in this show because Susan’s apartment is almost a character unto itself.

There are, however, are a few flaws. In just a couple of places, bits of dramatic music are used to accentuate particularly urgent moments. It is a valid idea, but it is overdone in its execution. These musical accents are overly melodramatic to a point of almost being unintentionally comic.

Also, Shum tends to mumble during the numbingly convoluted exposition that begins the show. The text, not the delivery of it, is intended to be opaque to set up later revelations.

You have to be willing to overlook some enormous holes in the script, like the fact that Susan can smell day-old cigarette smoke in her apartment, yet neither she nor any of the other characters can smell a rotting corpse in the closet. But, in the author’s defense, it does seem that dead bodies in plays and films seldom emit any odor.

But despite a few head-scratching moments, this show is a good, old fashioned piece of chill-inducing theatrical entertainment. If you aren’t scared now, just Wait Until Dark.

This story was originally published May 30, 2016 at 1:14 PM with the headline "Theater: ‘Wait Until Dark’ still scary after all these years."