The combination of the title “Gaslight,” the demands of the season and the demographics of the loyal audience at Northlight Theatre probably suggests to most people a wheezing holiday whodunnit in Skokie, something like Agatha Christie or a show in the theatrical vein of “Only Murders in the Building.”
But “Gaslight” really is not that at all, especially as directed by Jessica Thebus.
The play, originally known as “Gas Light,” was penned by Patrick Hamilton, who also wrote the play “Rope,” which was notably turned into an Alfred Hitchcock movie. After morphing into “Gaslight,” the 1938 work became a movie, a much lauded film directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman. It certainly qualifies as a thriller, replete with a dodgy police inspector and various secrets hidden in its single, upper-middle-class setting in the 1880s, as the married couple of Jack and Bella Manningham drive each other bananas under the titular illumination. The pair have two servants, one seemingly a matronly rock, the other a sexually adventurous maverick, and they add to the intrigue, as does the arrival of a detective, apparently from London, who tells Mrs. Manningham that her husband may in fact be something other than she believes.
So all of that is familiar territory. But Hamilton, whose script was adapted and Americanized in 2023 by the prodigious writer Steven Dietz, was a very skilled scribe, not so much a writer of fictive crime procedurals but a lover of psychological drama who based his work very much in the affiliated domains of marriage, intimacy and power. Dietz’s contemporary version of the play plays up those matters.
But what’s striking here is the veracity of Jessica Thebus’ production, stocked with skilled actors. Larry Grimm, who plays the patriarch more like Henrik Ibsen’s creepily condescending Torvald in “A Doll’s House,” which starts to make the case that “Gaslight” has more to do with turn-of-the-century naturalism than, say, “Murder on the Orient Express.” In that same vein, Cheyenne Casebier, a newcomer to town who I don’t believe I have seen work before, turns Bella into a Nora-like figure, whose insecurities and uncertainties are exploited by her husband so that she starts to question her own sanity. The effect of this approach from two very craftful actors is that the stakes rise far higher than in your traditional seasonal attraction.
Then there’s the intriguingly named Sergeant Rough, who Timothy Edward Kane turns into a figure of exuberant confidence but always questionable veracity, dangling you along as you try to figure out if he is who he claims to be.
Put all that together with Kathy Scambiatterra and Janyce Caraballo as the two housekeepers, so to speak, and everything bops along quite deliciously. This is quite the live-wire crew.
You would think this very much a traditional proscenium play but Collette Pollard’s very clever and self-aware set, one of the best in quite some time at this theater, allows Thebus to take more of a sculpted approach, and that only adds to our vistas into marital tensions and pain. Although intermittently amusing, this is an admirably tense show, both in the thriller sense and in the psychological sense. Some juice with your goose, so to speak.
“Gaslight” is very much my favorite of all Northlight’s recent holiday shows; its gassier predecessors have been anxious to please, whereas this combination of Hamilton, Dietz and Thebus offers much more of a flickering study of humans under pressure.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Gaslight” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Jan. 4
Where: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $24-$98 at 847-673-6300 and northlighttheatre.org