It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was, as I made my way downtown during the biggest snow storm of the Milwaukee winter season (so far). And that probably threw me off my game a bit so I wasn’t really prepared for the intense story telling I was about to experience at the Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Studio Theater. And for the record, I Don’t Believe In Ghosts! You will get that reference as you are experiencing The Woman In Black.
What we do have here is a compelling story rich in language, a strong story line that twists and turns and keeps us guessing…and a handful of surprises…a couple you can anticipate in a ghost story and a handful that will come…as a surprise!
After a family holiday gathering that ended with a session of shared ghost stories, which solicitor Arthur Kipps feigns to participate in, he is compelled to tell a story of his own that has haunted him, if I am doing the math right, for some 30 years. He has documented his story in a tome of significant proportions and enlists the aid of an actor to help him present it to an audience of friends and family.
Kipps begins by quietly reading his story from his journal and has us leaning in to hear as for a solicitor, he is particularly quiet in his speech and manner. This brings protests from The Actor and after several sessions and attempts at livening up the presentation, The Actor proposes a new course.
Instead of reading the story, the two principals will act out the key scenes with this added twist, the actor will play the young Kipps and Kipps will play all of the other characters in the story. This works amazingly well and now ‘we’ are wholly enmeshed in a play within a play.
This is an incredible bit of story telling on both the part of playwright Stephen Mallatratt and director Robin Herford. They both carefully nurture the precise language in the text and smoothly draw out the fright required of a good ghost story. Herford keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout as the story is told…and then wrenches us out of our seats on occasion.
There are two actors on stage…but three actors playing the roles in rep. David Acton plays Arthur Kipps, Mark Hawkins plays The Actor, and Ben Porter has turns as both. I am confident that I saw Acton and Hawkins the evening I attended. But the action and story telling was incredible and the actor interactions felt true to the story and made the suspension of disbelief automatic and unavoidable.
The set is the stage of a small and somewhat moth eaten theater and despite only two actors there is a fair amount of choreography necessary as they purpose and repurpose a few stage props and set pieces to their needs and change their outer costuming to suit each character change from a spare little coat rack at stage right. And there is a bit of theater humor here as The Actor employs a ‘new’ technical innovation to provide background sound effects to their play…which then reaches into our theater and experience just moments later. I won’t say more because it is part of the ‘surprises’.
This is a play that I would like to experience again, if I can fit it into my schedule, before it ends its run. It continues at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stiemke Studio through March 23, 2025.
Additional information and tickets can be found here.
Extra credit reading: the online program can be found here!
