Southbank's season finale: Serial killer's cousin con goes up in flames

Belle reflects on rising tide of deceased "cousins."

The fascination of murderous behavior, centered on one person over time, seems to have entertainment value, especially when the victims are numerous and mystery surrounds their deaths, as well as the perpetrator's. In journalistic terms, it's a story with legs (some of them dismembered from the bodies they belonged to).

When you walk into the Shelton Auditorium to attend Southbank Theatre Company's "Hell's Belle," carnival posters greet you, flashing into view the media frenzy that fed this public fascination before the broadcast era. 

The backdrop of the thrust stage, behind a few pieces of substantial farmhouse furniture, becomes from time to time a place to display historical photos and verbal messages. Amalia Howard's play carries into the production a concern for the reality of what Belle Gunness was up to in LaPorte, Indiana, in the first decade of the 20th century.

The grim business of "Hell's Belle" is about to proceed with a wicked smile. The amusement is largely a matter of presentation. Belle, a bitter, ambitious widow trying to escape the burden of immigrant poverty, has only a shriveled sense of humor. The way the play summarizes her fatal elimination of husbands and suitors, her quickness in tossing children aside (they are literally rag-doll props here), her obsessive focus on having cash in hand from prospective suitors — all that adds up to entertainment from the lowest moral depths, too sunken to draw Sunday-school lessons from. 

In theater terms, she embodies pure, no-holds-barred evil, reminiscent of Regina Giddens in "The Little Foxes" or Medea of ancient Greek drama. Those predecessors do not lend themselves to an almost cartoonish level of depiction, but Belle Gunness does, and Howard amplifies those features thoroughly. The courtroom drama aspect of the show in the second act deepens the story somewhat in the trial of a handyman, Ray Lamphere, who is charged with the final conflagration of the Gunness farm, but convicted only of arson, not murder. The mystery of the woman and the bucolic hellscape she created remain.

Effective power at the turn of the 20th century lay overwhelmingly in male hands. The American Dream seemed to apply to white men only. A woman obsessed with bettering her worldly situation was forced into chicanery, though for the most part not to this Hoosier farmwife's bloodthirsty extent. On opening night Lisa Marie Smith played the role with ferocity and focused abandon. Given the faith statement prominent in her program bio, I supposed Smith would have no trouble playing an evil character, as long as it was clear evil would not triumph at last. "Hell's Belle" does not have the saving grace of tragedy, but puts Satan in his place as a subordinate force in God's world. With the distance of time and perspective, the story can be acceptably recast under the mask of comedy.

Playwright in action

Contrary to custom, the playwright appears onstage continually, which meant that Howard as an actor did not seem used to everything she had written. Besides a context-setting narrator, she played mainly Belle's sister Nellie, but was given the additional challenge of sketch portrayals of others, most of them men. Playwrights suffer from too much of an overview, perhaps, and familiarity with the text may have a top-down effect at odds with inhabiting a character credibly.

The men with fuller responsibilities in the action are Ryan Moskalick (Lamphere and others) and Jim Cherry (wily suitor Andrew Helgelien and others). As seen Thursday, both took full-throttle approaches to their duties, and helped nail down the production's style of anti-realism and caricature. Becky Schlomann directed with evident enthusiasm for the material and the deft touches of spectacle in the production, whose designs are central to the show's appeal.

[Photos: Indy Ghost Light]