Playwright: adapted by David M. Rice from the novel by Horace Walpole. At: First Folio Theatre on the Mayslake Peabody estate, 1717 31st, Oak Brook. Phone: 630-986-8067; $23-$30. Runs through: Nov. 1
Horace Walpole was a star in his own right, of course. If not for his seminal novel, published in 1794, centuries of Old-Dark-House thrillers—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, among them—would never have been written. Besides, when your performance space is a sprawling pseudo-Tudor manor house, complete with a fully-outfitted Franciscan chapel, it’s only natural for a theatre company’s aesthetic to lean toward the gothic—a literary label nowadays associated with chick-lit shiveries, but once signifying chronicles as dense and weighty as any high-calorie Naming of Roses or Coding of DaVincis.
A baroque plot, involving complicated terms of inheritance between two powerful families in 16th-century Italy, introduces the neo-Jacobean elements that comprise the hallmarks of the genre to this day: cruel and/or negligent parents, helpless virgins, mysterious strangers, a ready supply of edged weapons, grisly phantoms, preternatural phenomena (most notably, a tombstone that spontaneously seeps blood) and ghostly interventions in the form of talking portraits, convenient thunderbolts, and incandescent vapors.
Reading matter designed to be savored slowly over long, firelit winter evenings offers a potentially cumbersome amount of narrative to pack into the abbreviated time of modern live performance. On its opening night, David Rice’s adaptation for the First Folio stage, clocking in at a tidy two and a half hours with one intermission, could not conceal unmistakable signs of last-minute editing, preventing actors from fully immersing themselves into their operatic personae and ornate milieu. (When your stage measures 48 feet by 35 feet with multiple levels—making for lengthy tramps even in the simple course of conversation—the traffic-control factor cannot be discounted, either.)
The cast of fresh young talents combined with seasoned northwest-suburban retainers were clearly on the right track, however, needing only a little settling-in time to overcome the stumbles engendered by insufficient textual and logistical familiarity before finding the correct pace for this Classics-Illustrated brand of period drama. And amid a plethora of shriek-and-giggle shows for the Halloween season, it can’t be denied that First Folio’s ambitious project, whatever its flaws, offers a refreshingly adult reminder of a time when “horror” was a product of things lurking unseen.