BWW Reviews: BAND OF THE BLACK HAND at Connecticut Repertory Theatre

If you'd like a voice in shaping new theater projects, make your way out to the Studio Theater at the University of Connecticut in Storrs this week to see phase two in a devised theater project that is actively seeking audience feedback. (Stage one involved audience brainstorming last year; stage three is a production planned for this coming fall in New York City.) BAND OF THE BLACK HAND is a stage mashup of film noir tropes (both visual and story based), interpreted with the aid of clever shadow screen work derived from Indonesian puppetry roots.

The 85 minute piece plays without intermission. It is the current project of the innovative Split Knuckle Theater, in collaboration with UConn's internationally known puppetry program. Split Knuckle is known for devising original productions about intriguing ideas, using inventive physical staging. Their last show was ENDURANCE, a marvelous meditation on leadership that combined Shackleton's Antarctic journals with the 2008 collapse of the insurance industry in Hartford.

What works here is the look and style of the production. Thanks to inoffensive but ever present haze, strong shafts of light cut across the small dark stage. At the rear, there's a square screen, where much story telling is done by actors casting shadows, bloody spurts of liquid, occasional rear projections, and cut outs. Two rolling metal frames in forced perspective move to create lots of different looks-offices, edges of buildings, a nightclub. The costume palette is carefully controlled: black and white period suits, outlined with dark suspenders, wide ties, and gray fedoras set the look. Two dangerous, duplicitous dames pop in red and white. With low budget but high skill, the artists succeed in replicating the cinematic look and rhythms of film noir.

What doesn't work is the plot, which is too complicated to track well. At the top, we learn there's a mayoral race afoot in a dark and dangerous city, a private eye with a shadowy past who is too fond of hooch for his own good, and a reporter at risk. Double crosses, gun-toting toughs, a tattooed secret society, a shared mistress, a daughter who is mad at dad, all swirl together in good noir fashion but--at least on one hearing--don't add up to a coherent tale or a satisfying ending.

Though the program tells us that one of the seeds of the piece is Eisenhower's speech on the rise of the military-industrial complex, the show has moved away from attempting cultural commentary. I have no problem with that; not all theater needs to be weighty with meaning. But this show might to do better to hew to its strengths in staging, simplifying the plot twists so as to thrill us with theatricality in service of a simpler story, told with great style. We need more of the stage genius of the pigeons created by actors with flapping umbrellas-totally unnecessary to the plot, and done only to cover a set change, but delightful. More humor, too, like that engineered by graduate student Kalob Martinez in the minor role of Rosco: he's a hoot. More such touches could carry the day in this piece, especially if it ran ten minutes shorter. But that's just my opinion. Go check it out and throw in your two cents: there's an audience survey included in the program. Don't dawdle, though: runs are short at CT Repertory Theater, the producing arm of the training programs at UConn. The last show is April 4.

Photo credit: Gerry Goodstein

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