Theater Review - The haunting

Good ghost stories, and the stage play The Woman in Black is one, know that the unknown is what’s truly frightening, and seeing a dangerous or otherworldly figure is never as chilling as imagining one. You can trace that rule as far back as spine-tinglers have been told: Start with the recent Blair Witch Project and follow it back through the films of Val Lewton, the writing of Daphne du Maurier and Edgar Allen Poe, and eventually you’ll find a caveman telling stories with superb timing around the campfire.

In adapting Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black, English playwright Stephen Mallatratt shows he has a finger on our quickening pulse. The play is in its 11th year at the West End’s Fortune Theatre, and reportedly counts as the second longest-running play in London theater history. In staging the wickedly entertaining work, ART Station immerses itself in Mallatratt’s spooky theatrics to offer its most lively production in years.

The play has a deceptively light-hearted beginning, as middle-aged Arthur Kipps (James Donadio) begins dryly telling a tale in an abandoned theater. He’s frequently interrupted by a young theater professional (Daniel May) who urges him to lighten up his presentation: “Think of your audience.” We learn that Kipps is obsessed by a secret from his younger days, and needing to express it publicly to get it off his chest, he’s hired the actor to teach him to convey his message more effectively.

Over the course of a few days, the two develop Kipps’ material from different perspectives — the actor reads the prologue, for instance — until they hit on the idea of enacting the story as a play, with the actor playing the young Kipps and the older amateur providing all the secondary characters. It’s a complicated device and at times confusing, but provides a kind of doubling of the story, allowing us to see both the young Kipps’ brush with the supernatural and the actor experiencing it second-hand — although the undead may be closer than he thinks.

As a young lawyer, Kipps goes to administer the estate of a recently deceased woman in a remote, mist-enshrouded English town. At the funeral, he describes seeing an enigmatic woman in black at the very moment that a dark-garbed figure moves down ART Station’s aisle. The entrance is so subtle that when you notice her, you give a start, and the play consistently makes efficient use of the entire performance space. Even shadowy figures in the lobby begin to look sinister.

Part of Kipps’ job is to go through the deceased woman’s papers, which involves spending many hours at a creepy mansion at the edge of a marsh filled with quicksand. Despite the nervy recalcitrance of the townspeople, he begins to piece together an old family mystery, at the peril of his own safety and sanity.

Directed by Heidi Cline, The Woman in Black finds the theater firing on all cylinders. A special nod must go to Henry Howard’s sound engineering, which provides all sorts of ominous creaks and howling gusts of wind. The junk-strewn set simultaneously conveys the decayed, disorganized mansion and the disarray of the modern playhouse. You can almost feel the company’s pleasure at implementing the haunted house effects, like the sinister locked door that, at the most tense possible moment, slowly swings open. Only a delirium scene near the play’s end overuses its best devices.

Donadio has a grand time playing multiple characters, including a plummy law boss, a gravel-voiced innkeeper and a sinister, soft-spoken coachman. May proves amusingly full of himself as the modern actor and nervous and vulnerable as the young Kipps, whose palpable terror rubs off on us.

For several years, ART Station has specialized in friendly, rather soft Southern comedies, and The Woman in Black is by far the theater’s most intense show in memory. (In fact, it may be a little too edgy for some of its older subscribers, judging from some of the reactions in the seats around me.) It’s full of startling moments, but the biggest surprise is that it wasn’t staged in autumn, as it would be the perfect tie-in with one of the area’s tours of Southern ghosts.

The Woman in Black plays through June 3 at ART Station, 5384 Manor Drive, Stone Mountain, with performances at 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat. and 3 p.m. Sun. $15-21. 770-469-1105. www.artstation.org.??