Kristin Towers-Rowles (Photo by Casey Durkin)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
Greystone Mansion
Through February 3
RECOMMENDED
When it comes to famous murders, you won’t find many more sensational than the 1929 murder-suicide that took place at Greystone Manor, a towering 55-room mansion perched high above the city of Beverly Hills. This is where Ned Doheny Jr., son of one of the wealthiest men in America, and his longtime secretary, Hugh Plunkett, were found fatally shot.
After a brief flurry of publicity, the incident disappeared from the headlines, a nod to the power of oil magnate Edward Doheny Sr., rumored to have quickly squelched the scandal. Although there are various theories about what transpired that evening, the actual circumstances remain a mystery.
In Kathrine Bates’ site specific play The Manor — Murder and Madness at Greystone, the mise-en-scène is all. Audiences assemble in Greystone’s main drawing room, where they are divided into three groups and led through the corridors and rooms of the gorgeously preserved estate where the actual murders took place.
It’s a clever conceit, well executed by director Martin Thompson, on-site stage manager Craig Hissong, and a ready cast, including a crisply efficient, in-period majordomo (David Hunt Stafford) and two servants (Katyana Rocker-Cook and Gail Johnston) who seamlessly conduct playgoers to the various locales.
Presented by Theatre 40, the Beverly Hills Community Services Department, and Ben and Ruth Marandy, The Manor is hardly the stuff of deathless drama. However, considering that it is now in its 19th season, it has clearly become a beloved seasonal sell-out, with tickets in hot and limited demand.
The real-life historical events, murky as they are, have been roughly adhered to, including the elder Doheny’s supposed bribe of a high-ranking government official — a corrupt scheme that may have factored into the tragedy.
However, the names have been changed, as well as (we suspect) the real motivations of the individuals involved. The self-made patriarch of this wealthy fictionalized family, Charles McAlister (assured Darby Hinton), participates in the lucrative conspiracy not out of greed but out of well-meaning patriotic zeal — a premise that seems disingenuous at best. Then there’s Senator Alfred Winston (glad-handing, appropriately smarmy Daniel Leslie), the progenitor of the plan, who sincerely and strangely affirms that his main motivation is serving his country — oh, and there’s that little side issue of paying off his massive gambling debts. The men’s respective wives (Carol Potter and Amy Tolsky, both excellent) sense disaster in the wind but are unable to stave off catastrophe.
Our foreknowledge that we will eventually witness a murder necessarily dampens some of the potential suspense, yet Bates largely foregoes the typical murder-mystery format, focusing instead on family dynamics. Chief among these is the love triangle that springs up among Charles’s doomed son and heir, Sean (Peter Mastne, who has a nicely casual quality but occasionally swallows his lines), Sean’s wife, Abby, (sprightly Nathalie Rudolph), and Gregory Pugh (fittingly moody Eric Keitel), a former handyman who has advanced to a position of trust in the McAlister empire. The long-repressed attraction between Abby and Gregory, not to mention Gregory’s increasing mental derangement, ultimately flares into violence.
Kristin Towers-Rowles chews the scenery to a fault as Gregory’s strident, gold-digging flapper wife, Henrietta, who quite literally drives her husband to distraction, while John Combs rounds out the cast as Abby’s father who, as Charles’s trusted attorney, tries to save his disgraced client from ruin.
The play’s biggest problem is Bates’s odd insistence on keeping her characters, excepting Henrietta, so blameless and sympathetic that they devolve into toothless stereotypes. Perhaps a bit more clandestine, deliberately covert hanky-panky might have amped up the emotional stakes. As it is, true-blue Abby valiantly represses her longtime longing for Gregory, while Sean, who considers Gregory a “brother,” is almost bizarrely oblivious to his wife and best friend’s subterranean desires — a strained dynamic that makes the play’s flashpoint seem overdue and inorganic.
Despite such dramaturgical shortcomings, The Manor is more an event than a traditional play. Delightfully atmospheric and purely fun, it takes us behind the scenes of a vanished world where the wealthy and privileged of the period could make a crime like murder simply go away — a demonstration of untrammeled entitlement that resounds to this day.
Greystone Mansion in Greystone Park, 905 Loma Vista Drive, Beverly Hills. Thurs.-Fri., 6 pm, Sat.-Sun., 1 pm, Jan. 27-28 only; thru Feb. 3. www.theatre40.org Three hours with an intermission.
