Thomas MacMillan Photo
Clockwise from top: actors Jeffrey Simno (portraying a cop named Ahern), Peter Chenot, Ryan Gardner, and Ian Alderman (portraying a cop named Lawler).
As the curtain went up on a new theater production in Westville, a century-old character came out of retirement — and reclaimed an ancient role.
The production is VaudeVillain, a crime drama based on a real-life Westville murder nearly 100 years ago. The play debuted last weekend and continues this weekend. It is based on New Haven Register and Hartford Courant articles from 1913, which tell the tail of a murder committed by a man named William Allen. His story is interpreted in five acts by A Broken Umbrella Theater company.
The play brings history back to life not only through its content, but also through its choice of venue. The production is staged in Lyric Hall, the antique shop and restoration business run by Westville’s John Cavaliere. His building was constructed around 1913 as a Vaudeville theater. Cavaliere recently restored the theater hall in the back part of the shop. The theater itself emerges as a central character in the new production.
VaudeVillain’s opening act takes place outside Lyric Hall. Subsequent acts lead the audience into and through the building, from its front chamber to the theater in the back. The historic structure becomes another character in the play, as it returns to its show-business roots.
“I feel like the building is happy,” Cavaliere said, after Sunday’s 6 p.m. performance. Cavaliere, who makes his acting debut as murder victim Frances “Pop” Cunningham in the play, was wiping fake blood off his face, using the mirror of a 1940s cigarette machine.
“This is the highest and best use of the space,” Cavaliere said. He said he’s thrilled to see the building again used as a theater, to see its past merging with the present. There was a moment in the play, he said, when all the other actors were arrayed in their period costumes, when he felt as though he were back in 1913.
At another moment, as he waited backstage for the play’s final act to begin, the blue and red theater lights and the thespians around him made him feel as though he were in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, he said.
“It was magical,” he said. “It was just magical.”
That magical moment came just before the climax of the play, when the psychological breakdown of William Allen reached its frenzied peak. As the play tells it, Allen (portrayed by Ryan Gardner, at right in photo) was an aspiring Vaudeville performer who worked on the railroad and hungered for show-biz fame. He was also a drunk and cocaine addict with a violent temper. The audience learns that about him in the opening scene, set outside Lyric Hall, where Allen’s rage upsets his girlfriend, Louise Ray (played by Megan Chenot, at left in photo), and drives her away. Pop Cunningham shows up; the two men head for a fateful night out on the town.
The action moves forward to the next day, as the audience moves inside. The next act is set in the bar of the Edgewood Hotel, which once occupied what is now Delaney’s restaurant on Whalley Avenue in the center of Westville. A pair of detectives, followed by a snooping reporter, are piecing together a murder. Through song-and-dance-filled flashbacks we see the events of the previous night, as Allen becomes drunk and belligerent. The detectives peg him as the murder suspect.
The bar then becomes a bank in Act III, where, in another case of fact meets fiction, real-life banker Bill Placke (in charge of the soon-to-open Start community bank) plays a Dapper Man at the Bank. A harried Allen, now a wanted man, enters the bank and is spotted by a cop, whom he shoots before fleeing.
Allen’s psychological unraveling picks up in the next act, back at his house. He carries on a cracked-up conversation with figments of his imagination, including his crazed alter-ego, the VaudeVillain, who taunts and goads him before cops come to arrest him. The vision of a newspaper boy also haunts Allen, offering him an edition of the Register with his face on the cover, as a murder suspect. Allen has gained a measure of the fame he sought, for all the wrong reasons.
In the final act, Allen fulfills another dream, as he finally takes the stage in the Vaudeville theater hall. But his dream is now a nightmare. As police brutally interrogate him, he is lost in a spiraling vision of murder, music, and darkness. The VaudeVillain (at left in photo) takes control, replacing Allen’s dream of a life in show business with a tortured glimpse of the life of a murderer. Instead of singing and dancing joyfully with his girlfriend, Allen is locked into a performance with the Vaudevillain, where the happy lyrics of Vaudeville take on dark new meanings. Allen’s descent into madness is complete.
While it’s not exactly the content of traditional Vaudeville performances, the form of the play is an homage of sorts to the traditions of Vaudeville, said producer and director Ian Alderman. Just as Vaudeville presented a variety of acts for theater-goers, VaudeVillain presents five various acts, each of which offers a different flavor of performance. The second act, for example, is filled with musical numbers, featuring the musical saw-playing of Polly Sonic. Then in the third act, spoken or sung lines are largely replaced by Stomp-style percussion that builds the scene’s tension through rhythm.
As in all Broken Umbrella productions, Alderman said, the space becomes a character in the play. The audience is physically immersed in the very real history of the fictionalized events.
As Cavaliere took off his makeup Sunday evening, he spoke of the building almost as a muse or a collaborative partner, with more work yet to come.
“I think this building has big plans for me,” he said.
VaudeVillain performances are scheduled to 2, 6, and 8 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 30 and 31. Get tickets here.