Another feast promised, 'The 39 Steps' becomes a hearty appetizer for IRT season

The opening of a theater season is a matter of many scheduling factors. It may chiefly be considered  the vehicle for an organization to put its best foot forward, to confirm its identity among old fans and to attract new ones to its mission. Departures from whatever the first production  represents can still be embraced as the season goes on if the public's first impression is positive. 

The cast introduces intself in pose and gesture as "The 39 Steps' opens. 

So Indiana Repertory Theatre deserves credit for innovative thinking in getting a thoroughly silly play on the boards to launch its 2025-26 series. Of course, the company had good reason to think "The 39 Steps" would generate paroxysms of delight among its loyal patrons to float its boat for a few months.  And if the IRT fall starts so, can the winter of "A Christmas Carol" non-discontent be far behind? There is even a hint of that annual hit (minor spoiler alert here) in an outburst of flung snow at the end of the current show, which opened Friday night.

The major spoiler I have no trouble avoiding with "The 39 Steps" is what its title means, and why there are extraordinary efforts to obscure it as the plot rattles along, rattling the self-satisfied life of a well-situated Englishman in tandem. Jürgen Hooper plays Richard Hannay, a Londoner whose every pose and gesture radiates self-assurance. Despite a modicum of ennui, keeping such a personality intact through a series of mishaps, including potential death, is the challenge that Hooper's Hannay surmounts with heroic nonchalance while on the run.

An early career milestone for Alfred Hitchcock (whose TV show theme alone is an earworm for Americans of my generation), "The 39 Steps" is an old film classic that it is useful to have seen before you become saturated in what Patrick Barlow (with refinements from others) has done to it. All of that history is filtered through the marvels of IRT's technical team and the sculpting of the action by Benjamin Hanna, directing an amazingly protean cast.

"North by Northwest" allusion to Hitchcockiana 

Yet there should be plenty of room for enjoyment among the uninitiated. To buttress that point from another current genre, I've found I  can be moved to laughter by a Randy Rainbow parody whether I know the song or not.  It's  an extra  thrill if you know the original behind Rainbow's "Clang, clang, clang went Josh Hawley" so  that "The Trolley Song" with Judy Garland is ringing in your memory's ears. 

This show's parody of Hitchock's film is devoted to the original in a host of madcap ways. Some of them are designed to have fun contrasting the all-at-once-ness of theater with the rapid shifts of focus that movies allow. Thus, the camera tracks Hannay and the strange woman who has enlisted his help (after they meet watching a gimmicky stage show) whenever they look outside from the man's apartment to wonder about two dark figures under a street lamp. Playing thoae figures (and a host of others in the course of the action), Ema Zivokoic and Michael Stewart Allen have to hastily reappear, schlepping the lamp, whenever  Hannay and the alluring, desperate Annabella Schmidt (Tyler Meredith) take a peek out the window. 

Political rally scene was funnier in the film, IMHO.

The way theater inevitably seems jerrybuilt out of scraps of reality that film puts together naturally at every point is part of this show's ingenuity. Of course, the movies took a while to avoid awkward foreground-background divides: the weakest point technically in an old classic such as "Casablanca" is Rick's recollection of the happy times he and Ilsa had in Paris. And not  until Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" did off-screen dialogue sometimes make a structural contribution to the story. The fun the complementary arts had imitating life took decades to develop in both media. Human attention is omnidirectional, after all, when it's working well. 

What helps make "The 39 Steps" work so well when thoroughly pressed toward hilarity is that the plot of the original is a tissue of implausibilities. To push the unlikeliness of Hannay's story into absurdity opens up many opportunities for outlandish turns such as Allen's impersonation of a ferociously pious Scottish farmer guarding the restless virtue of his young wife.

Of the IRT creative team, besides the surefootedness of Hanna's management of the cast, it's necessary to mention the brilliant variety and faux-authenticity of Lina Pisano's costumes and the wit and energy behind Lina Buchanan's scenic design. Uptownworks' sound design I'm less certain of: It helps flesh out the production's sensory overload, but the impression it made on me was inevitably obscured in the sweep of the action. 

The biggest laugh line in "The 39 Steps" is not a sight gag.  It's early in the first act, when one listless evening Hannay brings forward his need to do something pointless and trivial, so it's off to the theater, which is where he encounters Mr. Memory's act and all hell breaks loose.  That's a reminder that for all the profound weight the stage can carry, there are sometimes delightfully shallow reasons for going to the theater. IRT's "The 39 Steps" is a paragon among them. 

[Photos by Zach Rosing]