STAGE WEST: "Deceived" at the Old Globe

Brittany Bellizeare and Travis Van Winkle face off in "Deceived."                                     Photo by Jim Cox

            Playwrights Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson have taken Patrick Hamilton’s play “Gas Light,” which also inspired two films including the 1944 gem starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and rightfully empowered its heroine. Rather than having an intervening man solve the mystery of who and why someone’s trying to convince her she is mad, the heroine – named Bella in Wright and Jamieson’s iteration – will figure things out on her own.
            This is not a spoiler. It’s clear in the first act of “Deceived,” now onstage in the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White space, that the fraying of Bella’s fragile nerves is being manipulated. The missing pearls. The misplaced grocery list. The appearing and reappearing portrait. The thumping noises in the attic and the temperamental gaslight overhead in the otherwise sedate London home of Jack (Travis Van Winkle) and Bella (Brittany Bellizeare) Manningham.
            What is described more as a psychological thriller than a mystery requires two acts to unfold at the Globe, where Delicia Turner Sonnenberg directs a tense, stylish production that takes advantage of the White Theatre’s intimate confines to effect a claustrophobic atmosphere for the tormented Bella. Original music and strategic sounds by Fitz Patton arrive at timely moments, providing a cinematic touch that harks back to the ‘40s film and may startle audience members lulled into passivity by the play’s Edwardian-era properness – the formal exchanges between Bella and Jack, and the comings and goings of the gruff but dutiful housekeeper Elizabeth (Maggie Carney) and a newly hired (and bored by her responsibilities) maid, Nancy (Kennedy Tolson).
            For all the startlements and sound effects, the pace of “Deceived” is languid, mainly in the first act. Bellizeare’s Bella is ever on the verge of fainting, it seems, and there’s a sense of redundancy here.
            Propelled by the discoveries and revelations of Act Two, “Deceived” finds its thrills there when Bella has steeled herself and the play is injected with much-needed physicality.
            The weight of the storytelling naturally rests upon Bellizeare, a fine actor who last year made her Broadway debut in Ayad Ahtar’s “McNeal” that starred Robert Downey Jr. Her flustered, almost frantic Bella of Act One is obviously per the script, and in any event it’s supremely satisfying to see the character metamorphose via her own wits in the second act.
            Van Winkle struts his way through the unsympathetic role of Jack; one longs for a little more nuance in the one-dimensional character from the playwrights.
            The now-Los Angeles-based Maggie Carney returned to town last year to play a terrifying Annie Wilkes in Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company’s production of “Misery.” In years prior she’d distinguished herself as one of the most reliable and talented character actors in San Diego. Her delightful and audience-pleasing performance in “Deceived” is a reminder of that.
            Tolson recently appeared at La Jolla Playhouse in “Indian Princesses,” and she does well at the Globe in a completely different sort of part. Nancy gets to have her big moment in Act Two, and Tolson takes full advantage.
            “Deceived” wouldn’t be called a costume drama, but it is dramatically and beautifully costumed for 1901 London by Nicole Jescinth Smith. Even the household staff looks impeccable.
            The Old Globe’s delivered high-style summer entertainment this season and now adds the West Coast premiere of “Deceived” to the concurrent “The Comedy of Errors” in the outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre and the recently closed “Noises Off” in the proscenium space. In spite of its early slow going, “Deceived” is the elegant thriller it aspires to be and a reimagined “Gaslight” that Ingrid Bergman, who nevertheless won an Oscar for her ’44 performance, should have had.
            “Deceived” runs through Sept. 7 in the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre in Balboa Park.