Veronica’s Room – A Dose of Halloween Horror

Georgia Ketchmark and Paul Roder. Photo by Alicia Turvin

 By Tina Arth

I have a love/hate relationship with shows that have small casts. Love?  I relish the opportunity to really watch people develop their roles, and take great pleasure in giving brief recognition to each actor in my review. Hate? I pretty much have to mention each cast member, so a weak link really stands out. However, in the case of Twilight’s current production, Veronica’s Room, it’s love-love-love-love for the four remarkable performers who, under Alicia Turvin’s marvelous direction, bring Ira Levin’s creepy story to jarring, vibrant life.

It’s hard to give much of an overview of Veronica’s Room without spilling over into major spoiler territory. Leave it at this: it’s 1973, and a young woman (just referred to as “Girl” in the program) and her date (“Young Man”) have met an older couple, “Man” and “Woman” in a Boston café. Man and Woman are Irish, and are caretakers for an ill, elderly woman with dementia (“Cissy”) whose sister Veronica died of TB in 1935, after being locked in isolation in her room for several years. Cissy still lives in the family home, and Veronica’s old bedroom has been preserved exactly as it was when she died. Cissy doesn’t understand that Veronica died – rather, she thinks that Veronica left because she was angry with Cissy. Because Girl bears a strong resemblance to Veronica, Man and Woman have asked Girl and Young Man back to the home. The entire play takes place in Veronica’s room, where Man and Woman beg Girl to impersonate Veronica long enough to explain to Cissy that she’s not mad, thus relieving her “sister’s” anxiety in her last days. After discussing the plan with Young Man, who is not terribly supportive of the idea, Girl finally agrees to the deal, starting with choosing one of Veronica’s old dresses plus undergarments from the chifforobe and fixing her hair in a style suitable to 1935.  From this point on, playwright Levin plays with our sense of time and reality, there are a series of plot twists, and ultimately things go very badly. Perfect for Halloween, the play devolves into a tale of horror – to put it mildly, some people are a lot less charming in Act II than they were in Act I.

The play is written with four powerful roles, and each of the four actors is absolutely superb - which helps to makes a fundamentally creepy and disturbing show really compelling. Jaiden Wirth (Girl) delivers the performance of a lifetime, evolving from curious but reluctant through amused and adventurous, confused, frightened, acquiescent, and ultimately terrified. She is utterly believable throughout – and special props to her for never overplaying the role into a stereotypical hippie chick. Ryan O’Connell-Peller’s “Young Man” plays a single character with three very distinct personas, yet manages to remain distant and aloof in each – which somehow accentuates the evil.

Paul Roder (Man) maintains an aura of neurotic calm throughout, which initially tricks us into believing that he is relatively sane, even kindly, despite some unusual tics and quirky mannerisms – in particular, he exerts remarkable control of his facial muscles to create two completely different views of the same man.  As his counterpart, “Woman,” Georgia Ketchmark is the polar opposite – initially genial and outgoing, even somewhat bubbly, but evolving into uncontrollable rage as the real story emerges. Ketchmark also acted as fight choreographer for the show, and her work absolutely sparkles in Wirth’s frantic struggles.

The set is cluttered and dated, which makes perfect sense once the audience gets enough information to understand the intricacies of time and place. Mark Turvin’s sound design includes music that moves with the script – alternating between the mid-thirties and the early seventies and helping to create the eerie sense that time and place are malleable. Karen Roder’s costumes perform the same function, defining each character’s current reality by shifting style.

Veronica’s Room is not, in my opinion, anywhere near a perfect script – some of the transitions seem unnaturally abrupt, well suited to a dark mystery but allowing too little time for the audience to adjust to changing realities. However, four strong of performances more than compensate for Levin’s mild authorial shortcomings. The show is definitely R-rated for language, violence, partial nudity, and sexual imagery – but definitely a must-see for sophisticated audiences who appreciate fine acting served with a hefty dose of unrelenting horror.

Twilight Theater Company’s Veronica’s Room is playing at the Performing Arts Theater, 7515 N. Brandon Avenue, Portland through November 3, with performances at 8 P.M. on Friday–Saturday, and 3:00 PM on Sunday.  There is an additional 8:00 PM performance on Thursday, October 31.