The new show of The American Century Theater certainly demonstrates one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt … Ira Levin sure did know how to tell a great tale.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. He was, after all, the author of such engrossing yarns as "Rosemary’s Baby," "The Stepford Wives" and "A Kiss Before Dying." But few have heard of the play he wrote which had a very brief run on Broadway in 1967 which is now getting a revival playing at Theatre II in the Gunston Arts Center.
"Dr. Cook’s Garden" is simply a whale of a tale. The doctor in the title has been Greenfield, Vermont’s only doctor for decades, and as the play begins, is being visited by a young man who has been his protégé and is just about to enter the practice of medicine himself. Will he choose to emulate his mentor and join him in the small town of his youth or head for the big city to practice?
In Ira Levin’s mind, this isn’t the story, it is the set up for the story. He’s not interested in the mentor/protégé relationship for its own sake, although he creates interesting if predictable characters for both parts. The old doctor is reminiscent of the nice seniors played by Robert Young or Dick Van Dyke on old television re-runs and the younger one might just as well have been played by Richard Chamberlain in his "Doctor Kildare" days.
Levin’s play is really a mystery story with horror attributes which plays out as the young doctor discovers some troubling aspects of the older doctor’s practice. He presents the story in a three act structure all occurring in the old doctor’s office over one Friday afternoon in 1966.
The first act lays out the background of the situation, introducing the characters and explaining their relationship. The second introduces the troubling reality of the doctor’s practice and its impact on the small town he serves. Levin takes the story into the realm of horror thriller in the third act.
If this sounds like the theatrical equivalent of a good beach book, that is because it is exactly that. Of course, with a good escapist novel you really only need to devote half of your attention to the story while you remain aware of the sun on your skin, the wind in your hair and the cold drink (with either an umbrella or a wedge of lime in it) to make your vacation day a pleasure. At Gunston’s Theatre II you can’t get a tan and you can’t smell the suntan lotion but you can still follow the plot with ease and enjoy the obvious skills of the author.
Director Ellen Dempsey makes it doubly easy by avoiding any distractions in her production of the play. The actors all deliver their lines with clarity and the pace never gets too frantic. The final confrontation suffers a bit from this sense of restraint but, overall, it makes the evening an absorbing one.
David Schmidt and JB Bissex make their debuts with this theater as the two medical men at the center of the story. They give energetic, enthusiastic performances. Robert Lavery adds a small town Vermont feel to the proceedings as the gardener who tends the garden visible through Trena Weiss-Null’s set. Kathryn Cocroft and Carol McCaffrey keep the production from being an all-male event, but neither of their roles are really central to the story that Levin is telling.
It is that story, and its steady revelation of ever deeper oddities and disturbing clues, that is the purpose of the play and the production stays on track to provide the pleasure a thriller promises.
<i>Brad Hathaway reviews theater in Virginia, Washington and Maryland as well as Broadway, and edits Potomac Stages, a website covering theater in the region (<a href=http://www.PotomacStages.com> www.PotomacStages.com</a>). He can be reached at <a href=mailto:Brad@PotomacStages.com> Brad@PotomacStages.com</a>.</i>