“Are you ready to be scared?”
That’s the fragment of a conversation I overheard in the lobby of Main Street Theater before heading into their production of “The Woman in Black.” But having just eked through Hurricane Beryl and the days without power in the Houston heat that followed in its wake, I was sure nothing could scare me except maybe the words, “CenterPoint” or “Entergy!” As I awaited the dimming of the theater lights, I couldn’t help wondering if Main Street hadn’t been cursed by having a horror story on its schedule just as its audiences would be trying to recover from the horrors, both petty and great, of a hurricane.
They were not.
For despite its tricks with lights and veiled Victorian women floating on and off the stage, Main Street’s “The Woman in Black” trumpets the power of theater—even theater whittled down to bare bones–to explore and work to exorcise our nightmares and fearful memories. Based on a novel by British author Susan Hill, this adaptation by British actor Stephen Malatratt opened in a pub in 1987 and ran in London’s West End from 1989 to 2023—the second longest playing non-musical (outpaced only by Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap”) in English theater. It knows what it is doing, and, not surprisingly, it has actors and acting at its heart.
An older man, Arthur Kipps (Ian Lewis) has hired a young actor (Danny Hayes) to help him stage a reading to his friends and relatives of an account of his ghostly encounter when he traveled into the northeastern edge of England to settle the estate of the elderly woman, Mrs. Alice Drablow. But when Kipps’ reading is dull and prosaic, the actor insists that he dramatize, act it out, and with the blink of the lights, the two men switch roles: the actor becomes the young Kipps experiencing the encounter, and Kipps enacts the frightened locals who shy from visiting Mrs. Drablow’s aptly named Eel Marsh House and try to steer Kipps from going there. But go he does, and the haunting ensues—all brought to life with lights, sound effects, and brilliant acting on the part of Hayes and Lewis who even manage to bring to life a never seen dog—Spider—that they interact with.
In short, director Philip Hays has done a masterful job of polishing this gem of an English script and transplanted it beautifully onto Main Street’s stage. He has blocked the movements of his actors in their claustrophobic space to create illusions of a host of unstagables: a horse-driven cart, a railway car, a cemetery, and a deadly causeway into the marsh. Moreover, he keeps a steady pace, never rushing toward the thrill moments yet letting them have a full run when they arrive. His work is amply supported by Jodi Bobrovsky’s ingenious set design, Andrew Archer’s lighting, and Shawn W. St. John’s sound design. These mesh to evoke the tangible and the supernatural, the explainable and the terrors of the unconscious.
Though I found the script’s ending a big foggy, I’m not sure fog is a bad thing in a play such as this whose focus is not solvable mysteries but inner ones that have to be dealt with. And, sitting in the dark of the theater certainly helped my thoughts drift away from the harsh things just beyond the theater doors. Did you read in the paper about our odds for another visitation by a hurricane?
“The Woman in Black” is at Houston’s Main Street Theater through Aug. 11.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.
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