Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
October 4, 2017 6:00 p.m.
Seldom have I been as thankful to a cast and crew as I was to those who presented “The 39 Steps” last week. September had been a really challenging month. I chose not to evacuate with Irma as I wasn’t sure where to go. It seemed as though she was systematically targeting every place I thought would be a safe haven. Irma passed and I had a few limbs down in my yard but the worst problem was no electricity for coffee Monday and Tuesday mornings. The rest of the month, I seemed to be catching up. A friend termed it “Hurricane brain.” When I got tickets for opening night, I hoped that the play would prove a diversion and that I’d get a laugh out of it.
Diversion is putting it mildly. The plot is Hitchcock meets the Three Stooges, a wild and funny farce. The play takes a Hitchcock movie plot and lovingly mauls it. There are two stock Hitchcock characters. One is Richard Hannay, the leading man who is on the run from a false accusation of murder, and played by Brian Crane. He is the only one in the play who has just one role. There are also three female roles, all played by Samantha Hilliker. She is Annabella Schmidt, perhaps a spy. She is also Pamela and Margaret, a wife and a girlfriend but not necessarily in that order.
And then there is the rest of the cast – numerous and played with enthusiasm and wild energy by Bruce Gruber and Chris Twiggs. In the playbill, they are named Clown 1 and Clown 2 but that’s giving short change to their repertoire. These two take on all the other roles – various policemen, Scottish residents, an evil professor, and in one scene, husband and wife. This is accomplished through changes in hats, dresses, coats, accents, and such.
Gruber and Twiggs were the farce part of the play. They caused most of the laughter. There were wonderful bits where the Scottish brogue was torn to shreds. Scenes such as going out a doorframe and then turning the door around and entering through it. There were scenes of dying dramatically that had everyone laughing. All part of the fun. Chris literally threw himself into the roles he played with so much energy that, he must have lost 10 pounds in the performance.
It was really great to be able to just accept the craziness and laugh. After all the hurricane drama, the opportunity to laugh was so welcome. Thanks to Linda McClane and the cast who gave us such a good time.
Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. Evelyn is vice-chair on the Amelia Center for Lifelong Learning and is on the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.