“The Body Snatcher,” the newest show staged by Houston’s Alley Theatre, sounds like little more than a Halloween version of the Alley’s familiar “Christmas Carol.” Based rather loosely on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” fame, it seems sure to cook up a confection of 19th century English costumes, faux British accents, and some ooh and aah elicited by theater magic. But like all good Halloween treats, this production slips in some delicious surprises ranging from a romantic plot to an Act I curtain that strikes like a lightning bolt just before the lights flicker out. The result remains delightful, but it’s a delight with meat on its bones.
Author Katie Forgette, a veteran of the Seattle Repertory Theatre, has wisely kept Stevenson’s basic setting: a Scottish medical school in dire need of cadavers, made scarce by politicians passing the Anatomy Act of 1832, to train young physicians to know a femur from a tibia. It’s a gruesome world populated by high-minded scientists and body snatchers or “resurrectionists” who didn’t always wait for corpses to grow stiff without a little help. But it also provides the backdrop for fresh plots that Forgette transplants into Stevenson’s macabre world. One is the plot involving anatomy professor Dr. Robert Noakes who is desperately seeking a way to stave off his daughter’s early death due to a faulty heart. A second is the love story between the doctor’s daughter and a promising young surgeon trained by her father. The third is the story of a woman sentenced to the noose for poisoning a young child. Though at times the rhythm of keeping all the plots working creaks a bit, Forgette successfully weaves the web of her tale.
In doing so, her script raises issues as esoteric and contemporary as the ethics of transplanting organs along with women’s rights and the role of class in the justice system. Does the progress of medical science depend as much on the willingness of villains to bend the rules as it does on the imaginations of scientists who push the boundaries of those rules? One might even see here a commentary on the rights and dignity of the dead.
That these scraps of thought arise without torching the plot web has much to do with the ability of the actors to give their characters dimensionality. David Rainey as Dr Noakes moves easily from the elevated professionalism of his periodic lectures to his students urging them to imagine and dream new cures to the anguished father keeping track—and hiding—his daughter’s physical decline. He is the humane mad scientist whose heart is breaking. Alyssa Marek as his daughter Elizabeth captures the frailty of the ill as well as an adventurous temperament, longing for an unrestricted life. She has to deal with physical restriction for much of the play, but she never lapses into a doomed figure. At the other end of the emotional spectrum is Brandon Hearnsberger as the body snatching Fettes—a low and loathsome figure who gives his work an edge of humor that crawls side-by-side with his violence. Without dominating the play, he nevertheless steals scenes as well as bodies from the moment he crawls out of a grave to start the production until he flees from sight with cash in his pocket.
Director Brandon Weinbrenner keeps the cast in sync so that the plots, like the pieces of a Victorian pocket watch, all mesh into an enjoyable whole. He is ably aided by Yu Shibagaki’s elegant and simple stage design that uses sepias tone to set a Gothic mood. Lighting designer Pablo Santiago manages amazing sunrises and thunderstorms, and Asta Bennie Hostetter adds costumes ranging from lush tweeds to rags—all working to define characters and keep audience eyes glued to the stage.
Performed on the Alley’s smaller stage in the Neuhaus Theatre and lacking the familiarity of its main stage colleague, “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Body Snatcher” is a little sibling who makes good. From opening to ending, it snatches attention and with emotion and thought creates a solid entertainment.
“The Body Snatcher” is at Houston’s Alley Theatre through October 26.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.