"Stage Struck"

February 10, 2019 — This play has so many plot twists the audience is repeatedly surprised as one twist after another upends everything that happened before. In a continuation of its winter season live performances, the Peterborough Players in Peterborough, New Hampshire, presented Simon Gray's "Stage Struck," directed by Charles Morey and featuring a stellar cast of four, all veteran performers with wide-ranging experience. They included Kraig Swartz, one of the most prolific and popular Peterborough actors, and another frequent and equally popular performer, Lisa Bostnar, who has several TV roles to her credit and will be appearing in a made-in-New Hampshire movie, "Parallel America," in the near future. Appearing for the first time at Peterborough were Nicholas Wilder and Charles Weinstein.

The complicated plot involves former stage-manager Robert (Swartz), who has  happily given up his career to care for the household and pamper his successful actress wife, Anne (Bostnar). A visit by a gun and knife-toting friend, Herman (Wilder), ramps up the tension in this seemingly peaceful setting. Later, Robert's world is thrown into turmoil when Anne informs him she wants a divorce. It seems her psychiatrist (Weinstein) has put her up to this. Robert cooks up a scheme to get even, but of course, as in any good play, nothing works out as planned. There are counter-schemes and counter-counter-schemes that keep the audience guessing.

Of course, as you might suspect, the gun and knife become important props in the play, In fact, there's a warning in the theater lobby that there will be multiple gun-shots in the performance. Unfortunately, the gun was responsible for the only glitch in the otherwise perfectly executed play, when it misfired at a crucial point near the end. But the actors got past the malfunction smoothly, and I think most of the audience understood it was unintended.

The sumptuous living room set with its plush furniture and towering bookcase was the work of Emmy Boisvert. That ingeniously designed bookcase was the site of one of the most startling events of the play. Bethany Mullins did a great job on costume design, particularly Lisa Bostnar's.