A collaborative feast for your Private Eyes

By Timothy Faust     11/6/08 6:00pm

Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts shows, which have tremendous financial and professional backing, have traditionally suffered low audition turnout because most experienced or talented performers are wooed or pressured into joining their friends' or college's shows months, even semesters, before auditions. On the other hand, the student-run Rice Players are sometimes able to pull a significant amount of talent to auditions but have never been blessed with beaucoup budgets.For the first time, in an effort to bridge the performance gap on a campus already saturated with shows, the two groups collaborated for the first time to produce Ted Dietz's Private Eyes. Hopefully, this is only the first collaboration of many.

Dietz, whose clever writing makes him a spiritual successor to one-act guru Tom Stoppard, wrote Private Eyes with the intent of making his audience work. The script, jam-packed with subtle wordplay (and some blatant, banal puns) weaves forward and backward in time at breakneck speed. Ever postmodern, Dietz uses and abuses the structure of a play-within-a-play (which is sometimes itself within a third larger play that questions the reality of the whole thing) and demands that both the performers and audience are in top shape. The team assembled by VADA and the Rice Players is almost entirely up to the task.

The first and most important thing about Private Eyes is this: Whether tame or absurd, it looks gorgeous. VADA Production Manager Matt Schlief is well-known for creating complex and engaging sets even in the extraordinarily imperfect Hamman Hall facility, and here he lives up to this reputation with gusto. The design of Private Eyes, created with the assistance of Lovett College sophomore Alicia Hernandez, disguises the limitations of the building with a wide-angled set crowned by hanging industrial lights.

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Private Eyes' visual appeal stretches beyond the set design. Julia Traber, a visiting theater lecturer and director this semester, bestows upon Private Eyes a polish obtainable only by experience. Rarely at Rice does the actors' blocking aid the production's storytelling as clearly as in Eyes; repetition of little visual themes and callbacks to previous positioning weave well with the tremendously witty (and repetitive) script. But Traber and Schlief are professionals, so their work is supposed to be of professional quality - they are not the people who are balancing their own grades (and kegstands) with the production.

The actors strive respectably to carry a very gnarled and layered script by emphasizing, sometimes too strongly, each salient plot point and witticism in their own lines. These sometimes surface-level performances are individually entertaining, but never really create a connection between different characters and ultimately cost Private Eyes that subtle interplay which might tie the ensemble tighter.

As protagonist Matthew, Will Rice senior Michael Rog is bumbling, earnest and delightful - good-hearted but reluctant to commit. His performance is low-status and low-key, but high-quality; he does a very good job of helping the audience ascertain Matthew's motives even through the perilous play-within-a-play structure. However, Rog misses some of the introspection Matthew claims to observe and never wholly reaches the emotional peaks and valleys needed to really resonate with the house.

His foil is self-admitted "prick" Adrian, played by Lovett junior Viren Desai. Desai clearly enjoys his role as an adulterous, pretentious director, and this enjoyment is evident in the careful attention to Adrian's physicality and posture - but only when he's in the spotlight. From his the moment of introduction into the show, it is evident that Adrian is having sex with Matthew's wife Lisa, played by Jones College freshman McKenzie Sorenson, but this eroticism and the licentious thrill of their affair is not convincing.

Sorenson herself is a talented actress with much potential for the Rice stage, but Lisa's role is easily the most complex in the entire show, and Sorenson is not rooted firmly enough in the character to express the wide range of subtleties needed for the performance.

The first collaboration between the student and departmental facets of Rice theater was, all in all, very fruitful. Private Eyes' dazzling and precise visuals almost compensate for whatever shortcomings may be found in the delivery of a spectacular script. Rice students who wish to become involved with campus performance, especially as a director or a designer, would be well benefited by attending.

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