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Rhymes with Evil
Traeger’s 1986 play, receiving a belated Midwest premiere, sports a solidly suspenseful ending sequence, but the playwright takes so long getting there—and makes pit stops at so many laughable clichés along the way—that we’ve long since tired of the premise. The story concerns “eccentric” former small-town schoolteacher Lathan (Luther), who has turned his house into a universe of dolls, puppets and costumed personalities for his young daughter (Heffernan); his estranged wife, Sara (Gilbert), is returning from a trip to New York ready to serve him with divorce papers, though she still has affection for him.
And that, frankly, is where our ability to suspend disbelief hits a wall. Lathan is written as such a sociopath it’s impossible to buy Sara’s continued defenses of his behavior to her sister (Castiglione) and new love interest (Baldeschwiler), who ask repeatedly how much longer they have to put up with this shit. (Sadly, we’re on their side.) The actors do their best with Traeger’s overwritten, clunky exposition and his meandering sidebars that go nowhere; in one scene, much is made of Lathan’s use of male pronouns to refer to Sara, but it’s never explained or mentioned again. Golob’s production is handsome enough; Keith Pitts’s set, with its walls lined with creepy dolls and Meredith Miller’s custom puppets, sets the title’s promised mood. But Traeger’s play is really 20 minutes of spooky following two hours of bad melodrama.
