At the Laguna Playhouse, 'Red Herring' is a fish of many colors
A straightforward murder mystery morphed into something a lot more convoluted when playwright Michael Hollinger began paying attention to his muse.
By PAUL HODGINS
The Orange County Register
Part noirish murder mystery, part romance, part '50s social satire, Michael Hollinger's play "Red Herring" is not an easy fish to fillet.
"It's an amazing piece. It's a little bit of everything," said Laguna Playhouse artistic director Andrew Barnicle, who's helming a production of "Red Herring" that opens at his theater this weekend. "Finding the right tone for it has been challenging but fun. This thing combines film noir style with a lot of other things, and it's all done with tongue slightly in cheek – but it's a sharp tongue."
One thing about "Red Herring" is not in dispute: it's a tour de force for its performers. Six actors must perform about 20 roles, sometimes with only seconds to transition from one part to another. ""There are some really quick changes, and it's clear (to the audience) what's going on," Barnicle said. "Someone flies out one door and in another."
Set in 1952, "Red Herring" takes place at a time of high paranoia. The McCarthy hearings are in full swing; the first H bomb is about to be detonated. Three couples – one in their 20s, the second in their mid 30s, the third pair over 40 – are involved in an intertwined espionage plot about a Soviet spy, FBI agents trying to find him, and a series of false identities. Along the way, we get a primer on the northeastern fishing industry.
If the plot sounds a little overburdened, it's all his fault, Hollinger says. "I like studying dramatic form, but my plays usually mutate along the way. Nothing ever comes out as a pure farce or classic kitchen sink drama. I was interested in a couple of forms with 'Red Herring.' Shakespearean comedy, and by extension musical, theater, often use leapfrogging stories that track different couples. And everything resolves happily in the final scene. It's a really powerful form if you get it right."
At first, though, Hollinger set out to write a straightforward crime tale. But he couldn't get rid of certain seemingly extraneous elements that were percolating in his head at the time.
"When I began it was just an exercise in hard-boiled detective stuff. But as usually happens with me, when something begins with a superficial interest, I usually get to the point where I get kind of sick of it. I ask myself, 'What's this really about?' I decided this play was really about analyzing and refracting marriage: getting to it, enduring it, recovering from it. Many characters give us their take on marriage and what it means. Some are cynical, some are idealist."
HARVESTING THE ZEITGEIST
Hollinger's own marriage, in addition to his unusual family history, led him to this unexpected focus, the playwright said.
"I'd been married eight or nine years, and I was reflecting on a couple of things. My parents came together as pretty broken individuals. My mother had two kids from a previous marriage and left her husband because he was a philanderer. My dad married a woman who was a good deal older and he was greeted at the doorstep one day by her 14-year-old son, whom she had never told him about. My parents married in a Virginia police station as soon as their divorces were finalized. So the story of my parents was of a non-picture book marriage that somehow worked out."
With three couples of various ages, a hop-scotching story, a murder and an espionage element, a director has his hands full just making sense of "Red Herring," Barnicle said.
"Much of the play takes place in Boston in and around the docks. But there are also scenes in Wisconsin and the South Pacific. And Senator McCarthy and his wife and daughter are characters."
Simply finding a way to jump quickly from one locale to another was a conceptual and logistical challenge, the director acknowledged.
"We use a Boston dock as the central area then bring out emblematic props for the other scenes. City Hall is represented by a little counter that just rolls onstage, for example."
Barnicle discovered Hollinger's work about seven years ago. "A play called "Incorruptible' came over the transom – a medieval con man play. I like it a lot, but it couldn't quite earn its way into the seasons we were doing at the time. I always remember how funny it was."
The comedy in this script, Hollinger said, is incidental to his purpose. As he delved into the politics and culture of America in the early 1950s, he became more and more fascinated with the time – and its parallels with our own.
"One of the things I enjoy in writing these plays is harvesting the zeitgeist and allowing particular settings and period references to act as resonators. This era was all about Nixon and McCarthy and Commies under the bed. I think paranoia is a recurring motif in America. Whenever the nation's under stress, we swing into a state of fear and anxiety and suspicion of foreigners. That pattern's as regular as clockwork."
