TNT finds comedy in Cold War with ‘Red Herring’
NILES — “Red Herring” is a fun, silly comedy that takes audiences back to the early days of the Cold War, or at least how they were portrayed in the movies.
Trumbull New Theatre has a game cast that finds a lot of the humor in Michael Hollinger’s play, even if there are more than a few missed opportunities.
The show is set in Boston in 1952, and the action focuses on three couples. Maggie (Allison Bye) is a Boston police detective who clearly is smitten with federal agent Frank (Chase Miles), but she is skittish to accept when he proposes.
Lynn (Casey Murphy), the daughter of Commie-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, is far more excited when she gets a proposal from her beau James (Marc Bye), a physicist working on the hydrogen bomb, even after he reveals he’s a Soviet spy and asks his bride-to-be to drop off some classified blueprints.
The third couple is Mrs. Kravitz, (Molly Cravalho), who runs a boarding house, and Andrei (John Brien), one of her boarders. She commits murder, dumps the body in the harbor and tries to make it look like the victim is Andrei, a Russian expatriate forced to work with the Soviets in order to protect his wife, who they’ve imprisoned.
Miles has that old-school, cynical gumshoe shtick down pat that is perfect for the arch tone of the script. According to the program, Allison Bye has no prior stage experience but proves to be a natural. They easily are the most convincing of the three couples. Murphy is funny as she gets increasingly frazzled trying to fulfill her fiance’s request.
As the show was originally written, the six main actors also play all of the minor characters. Director John Crank decided to expand the cast to nine members to lighten the load for the main ensemble. Cher Halas gets the best role of the three as Lynn’s mother and has some funny moments with digs at her infamous husband and her attempts at offering wedding night advice.
This isn’t a play where the audience is supposed to lose itself in the minutia of the plot. It’s a broad comedy where imagining the actors having to make quick changes backstage to play wildly different characters is part of the fun. Expanding the size of the cast in some ways dilutes its overall comedic impact.
Cravalho does a great job creating two distinctive characters as she also plays a woman who issues marriage certificates while having a very jaded view of matrimony. The line is blurrier between the multiple characters Brien and Marc Bye play. A ridiculous wig or barely attached mustache on one of those minor characters only would accentuate the joke.
Easily the funniest scene on opening night came when Andrei has to pretend he’s a mute in front of Frank while demonstrating how he’s still able to communicate with Mrs. Kravitz through a series of elaborate and increasingly hysterical pantomimes. The physical comedy and reactions by Brien, Miles and Cravalho were perfect, along with Crank’s staging. And there’s a great callback a scene or two later when Frank reenacts those pantomimes for Maggie.
A couple of other set pieces — one with Lynn and James trying to carry on a phone conversation on a line with a significant time delay, and another with Andrei and Lynn competing with each other for the attention of a priest (Steve Halas) didn’t fare as well. Both bits demand flawless timing, but sputtered instead.
Crank handles multiple tasks well on this production. The fight choreography is impressive, and set design is a minor miracle in accommodating the many scene changes and multitude of locations the play requires. Even with that ingenuity, there were a couple of rough transitions, but I wouldn’t challenge Crank to a game of Tetris.
If you go …
WHAT: “Red Herring”
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday through Jan. 26.
WHERE: Trumbull New Theatre, 5883 Youngstown-Warren Road, Niles.
HOW MUCH: Tickets are $17 for adults and $15 for students and are available online at trumbullnewtheatre.tix.com and by calling the TNT box office at 330-652-1103.