Veronica’s Room
Written by Ira Levin
Directed by Charles Riffenburg
at Heartland Studio, 7016 N. Glenwood (map)
thru Oct 27 | tickets: $20 | more info
Check for half-price tickets
Read review
A truly twisted psychological thriller
BoHo Theatre presents
Veronica’s Room
Review by Clint May
As October starts its autumnal chill (any day now?) and haunted houses all around dust off (or put more dust on) their skeletons and ghouls, BoHo Theatre has quietly opened a house of its own. Just one room of it, actually, but it’s a ‘room’ so twisted it has the suffocating air of an MC Escher drawing. If your favorite kind of scare is more ‘creeping dread’ than ‘hungry dead,’ Veronica’s Room is a near-perfect way to get your spook on for the season. There’s a nightmare just through the door, a door that mimics the one that took us to a realm of ‘shadow and substance,’ and a wooden floor beneath which
Susan (Amanda Jane Long) is on her second date with the handsome lawyer Larry (Chris Ballou). A chance encounter at a restaurant with an elderly couple (Sean Thomas and Sarah Wellington) has led them to an adventure of sorts. Drawn in by the couple’s Irish charms and the promise that Susan looks just like a deceased member of the family they used to tend, Susan and Larry decide to follow them back to the foreboding Brabissant mansion to verify the similarity. Along the way they make a strange offer. If it’s not too much trouble, could Susan play the part of the long dead Veronica to ease the troubled mind of the last surviving Brabissant, Cissy, whose dementia has reverted her to 1935 (from the present day of 1973), a time when Veronica was still alive. They assuage her concerns that it could possibly be cruel by promising that it will only take a moment and will ease Cissy’s impending death, as her old-turned-young mind struggles with Veronica’s absence.
Inside a room kept as a shrine to the dead, they begin to tell the tale of an uncommonly talented girl with a life cut short by tuberculosis. Veronica embraced life with many hobbies and a kindly nature while living most of her life mysteriously quarantined inside the room (why she wasn’t sent to a sanitorium is the first of many mysteries). Despite Larry’s hesitations as to potential ulterior motives, Susan eventually agrees to the charade. Thrilled, the genial old couple begin to remake Susan into Veronica.
That’s all that can really be said without giving away too much of this psychological thriller. What appears at first to be a turn-of-the-screw slow burn approach to your typical ‘horror in a Victorian mansion’ mystery soon kicks into high gear and remains there throughout the remainder of the short 90-minute run time. Veronica’s Room leads the audience through a labyrinth of theories as to what is happening that begin, fall, rebuild, then fall again in rapid succession as we struggle to make out what’s true, who’s who, and what really happened in Veronica’s room.
As directed by Charles Riffenburg, Room deftly (and appropriately for a show that leaves reality this far behind) keeps its melodrama but coaxes some engrossing humanity from these bizarre characters. Long in particular sells Susan as a smart woman of her era who does what many of us would do in a similar circumstance (though of course, don’t we all want to yell through the fourth wall to say what *we* would have done?). She struggles to maintain her grip on reality while everything beings to assault her once firm grounding. Wellington and Thomas are exquisitely perverse with a creepiness that continues to reach new heights every 10 minutes or so with each new grotesque revelation.
My best recommendation is to do as I did, and sit in the front row to let as much of Jameson Sanford’s detailed set leech into your vision. Just put yourself as far inside the room as possible for maximum chill. Those of you who like to be grabbed not by hands under a bed but by fingers under your skin, hurry on down to BoHo Theatre for their haunted mansion of the mind.
Rating: ★★★½
Veronica’s Room continues through October 27 at the Heartland Studio, 7016 N. Glenwood (map), with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays 2pm. Tickets are $20 (with discounts for students/seniors), and are available by phone (866-811-4111) or online at OvationTix.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More info at BohoTheatre.com. (Running time: 90 minutes, NO intermission)
 
  |
Photos by Peter Coombs
artists
cast
Amanda Jane Long (Girl), Chris Ballou (Young Man), Sean Thomas (Man), Sarah Wellington (Woman)
behind the scenes
Charles Riffenburg (director), Kaela Altman (violence, choreography, producer), Jameson Sanford (scenic design), Megan Turnquist (lighting design), kClare Kemock (costumes), Josh Wentz (sound design), Cassy Schillo (props, asst. director), Steve O’Connell (dialect coach), Ryan Keller (stage manager), Meg Love (production manager), Peter Coombs (photos)
13-0955
