Review By Tom Mcelfresh

Photo By Sandy Underwood

Robert Rais and Sherman Fracher in Private Eyes

It is a double-barreled feast for the ears. Private Eyes, staged perceptively by Michael Haney for its local premiere at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC), is a comedy by Steven Dietz, filled with funny words, well assembled and particularly well spoken.

Two essential qualities differentiate live theater from preserved forms of entertainment. Film and television are about motion and images. You go there to see things. The theater, bless it and preserve it, is about emotion and ideas. You go there to put your ears to work.

First, to hear the resonant sound of natural, unfiltered, unequalized voices being manipulated solely by the actors who own them, filling the room in which they are speaking. The ETC actors use good voices well, most notably Robert Rais and Sherman Fracher, of which more a little further along.

Second, to feast upon the words of our often battered language, to hear words cherished for their value, chosen with care by an able playwright and ordered into pungent sentences. Dietz has not yet scaled the pinnacles of Edward Albee or Harold Pinter, but herein he writes a similar strain of spare, staccato, deceptively simple dialogue that must be spoken with absolute precision. His sentence structure is so artful that even the simplest words -- especially the simplest words -- convey his brightest jokes and his most perplexing mysteries.

Private Eyes is about ... Well, now, here's where it gets tantalizing. What the hell is it about?

Either the playwright or ETC's media release writer described it as "a comedy of suspicion." True, as far as it goes, but there's more. In Scene One a theatrical director (Rais) seems to be auditioning an actress (Fracher) for the role of a waitress in an upcoming play. But, at a crucial juncture the scene is interrupted by a director (Greg Procaccino) who is conducting a rehearsal of the audition scene. (Or is he?) The actor and the actress are married, at least at some level of reality. The actor suspects, probably correctly, that his wife is having a smooch-up with the director.

When they all go to lunch, their waitress, who also may be an international spy (Sunshine Cappelletti), starts sending secret messages written inside match boxes. Of course, she may be auditioning for a role as a spy. The actor/husband (the one who plays the director) devises a scheme in which he poisons some salad dressing which the waitress (or spy) brings to his wife and her perhaps lover (the director). But, then, as the actress and director fall writhing to the floor in their death throes, a psychiatrist (Cliff Jenkins) pops in to set the play within the play into an even more bizarre context.

You got all that? No? Don't worry about it. You are right where you need to be with Private Eyes. Perplexed and listening hard. The play's shifting planes of perception and reality glide across each other effortlessly. They interrupt each other, frequently replicate each other in slightly different contexts. Sometimes they can't be separated from each other. As the planes shift, Dietz forces playful contemplation of the corrosive nature of suspicion and its results. He investigates the price (and reward) of deception. He takes a comic whack or two at the toll of infidelity, but leaves room to consider its rewards, as well.

Or, does he?

Maybe he, Haney, the able cast and the designers who put together ETC's spare, fluid production have just manufactured an amusing theatrical reality that invites audience members to open private ears and gather private perceptions.

The words of Private Eyes are favored with good readings from all ETC hands. But, they are given particularly fine readings by Fracher and Rais. As the deceiving wife, she moves easily from etching sarcasm to endearing sincerity and doesn't miss a punch line. Rais is quite simply one of the most versatile and powerful actors around, as demonstrated by his success in roles as diverse as the father in Violet, a musician in Side Man and the keen, mean achiever of Private Eyes. ETC is richer for his work and members of its intern company are enriched by his example.

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A Hard Choice (May 4, 2000)
Milk Spilt, Lives Spoilt (March 30, 2000)
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