![]() ![]() “Hitchcock Blonde” explores a tantalizing question: what happens when such fixations have a chance of satisfying themselves? Hitch worships and torments his unavailable ice-cold blondes Alex feeds on a fascination with the cinematically unattainable, personified by a long-ago encounter with a beautiful ticket seller at the local cinema Jennifer, haunted by demons of her troubled childhood, craves professional legitimacy the Janet Leigh double, itching to escape her dead-end marriage, seizes upon Hitchcock as the one who can fulfill her desperate dreams of stardom. Johnson interweaves these stories, sometimes expertly, sometimes with the ham-handedness of a creator who wants too keenly to illustrate parallelisms of theme and character.Įach of these people harbors an obsession. Is a murderer just beyond the frame? And who is this attractive but unknown actress? In the grainy footage, a blonde flips a light switch to no avail, then resigns herself to the dark and slips into the bath, leaving the door ajar to provide some light. ![]() As Alex and Jennifer work with frustratingly incomplete shards of film, they try to make sense of what they see, and we watch the lost thriller come alive on the walls of the villa behind them (thanks to brilliant moving projections by set designer William Dud-ley, which integrate seamlessly with the set and also provide scenic background). The third part of the story concerns the lost Hitchcock film. Clearly, something’s about to blow in this emotionally overwrought household. At home, she has an uneasy relationship with her smoldering, jealous husband (a mute role played to perfection by Martin Noyes). Eating dinner while perched on a prop toilet, Hitch punningly rhapsodizes about the virtues of his Dover sole: “Its sole purpose is to translate necrotized matter into angelic flesh.”īut “Psycho’s” body-double blonde is more complicated than she seems. Hitchcock loves to play with his movie women, and he has a fine time with this one, who acts like a dumb blonde from Central Casting. Hitch is working with Janet Leigh’s body double in “Psycho.” When we meet them, he is about to film the famous shower scene. We also meet the great director himself, imitated with spooky verisimilitude by SCR regular Dakin Matthews. That story is only one-third of the play. He has ulterior motives, of course: He’s infatuated with Jennifer. Pouring on his raffish charm, Alex persuades Jennifer to spend the summer with him in his Greek villa helping to put together the film’s pieces. ![]() He enlists the help of Jennifer (Adriana DeMeo), a moody American film student with a deep distrust of men, particularly shifty patriarchal figures like Alex who remind her of her own troubled past. He has stumbled onto seven moldering canisters that may contain Hitchcock’s first movie, a 1919 project that was never released.īut first he has to reassemble the decaying snippets. While some may feel queasy about what Johnson’s story has to say about men’s and women’s erotic predilections, most will find something to like in this fascinating script, which combines several genres – mystery, romance, thriller, psychosexual Grand Guignol – into a shaggy but enjoyable diversion.Īlex (Robin Sachs) is a 50ish British film professor with a career-making project in his hands. Terry Johnson’s play “Hitchcock Blonde,” which is making its American debut on South Coast Repertory’s Segerstrom Stage after a successful run in London’s West End, uses that bit of Hollywood lore as a springboard for a fanciful and fascinating examination of the relationship between creative and sexual obsession. Hitch was a voyeur and a sadist who loved to torture his leading ladies on- and off-screen – especially the blondes. He was also a bit of a sexual deviant, as anyone with even a passing knowledge of his oeuvre can attest. Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most brilliant film directors in history. ![]()
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