By Cynthia Citron
LOS ANGELES –A convicted murderer sits on Death Row convinced that he is Cary Grant. He is warm, charming, and black. Is he delusional or merely pretending in order to amuse himself?
His defense attorney, who is appealing his conviction, believes his previous attorney badly mishandled his case. Moreover, she believes he is innocent of the murder of his wife. This is the premise of playwright/director Rick Pagano’s new play, Treat Yourself Like Cary Grant. An imaginative idea that somehow goes awry in the telling.
Kim Estes plays Cary Grant with appropriate panache, but the clipped accent and Grant-ish inflection soon becomes repetitive and tedious in its unchanging timbre. Erin Carufel, on the other hand, plays attorney Roberta Farraday as a tightassed, humorless, workaholic with “don’t-touch-me” issues. Why her warm-hearted live-in boyfriend (Randolph Adams) sticks around is yet another mystery.
Attorney Farraday’s emotional aloofness is subsequently clarified by her maliciously disapproving father (Jan Monroe), a Federal judge who is perpetually angry that his daughter has chosen to be a defense attorney for convicted felons rather than a high-priced corporate lawyer.
And then there is Claire (Christine Syron), the murdered wife, who appears perpetually to her husband, dancing seductively for him and with him but uttering not a single word. In fact, the only time she speaks is in a confrontational dream sequence with attorney Farraday.
Estes, in his unrelentingly cheery Grant-ishness offers pithy advice to his attorney. “The most important thing is style,” he says. And, as Grant, he credits himself as “famous for bringing joy to the masses.”
Eventually, it has to be assumed, he brings a change of heart and a softening glow to Farraday, but you can’t tell by her acting. She remains cold and stiff to the very end; her only concession to any emotional epiphany is donning a long silk scarf that he had given her as a gift. And where he got a long silk scarf on Death Row is another unanswered question.
In the interim, she acquaints herself with Grant’s oeuvre by watching some of his classic films. Set designer Adam Hunter brings us a few scenes with Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Ingrid Bergman, badly projected in faded black and white and badly framed and repeated on two scrunched-up sheets that make them barely discernible. What’s more, the scenes are poorly chosen, having nothing to do with the concurrent action of the play, and each is inexplicably projected more than once.
In the end, if you want to treat yourself to Cary Grant, may I suggest that you stay home and rent North by Northwest?
Treat Yourself Like Cary Grant will continue at The Lillian Theatre, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., in Los Angeles, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 through September 18th. Call 323-960-7745 for reservations.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. She may be contacted at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com