Adapting a sprawling work of fiction into a time-limited form such as a play or a film provides many opportunities for creative innovations, but it also comes with plenty of potential pitfalls. Such is the case with the Alley Theatre’s current production, an adaptation of Dan Brown’s best-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code.”
As written by Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel, this script demands a production that can carry the audience to some of Europe’s most renowned sites: Paris’ Louvre galleries, London’s Westminster Cathedral, and rural Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel. How does a company shrink such buildings’ soaring architecture onto a mere stage? Success demands theatrical magic that the Alley production handles with aplomb. Arches and crypts slide on and off; walls of paintings, stained with graffiti appear and dissolve. Without attempting to challenge film’s ability to shoot on site, this production recreates the sense of such spaces with awe-inspiring technical skill. It makes scenic designer Michael Locher function as a star of the show.
At the same time, the need for barrels of exposition and multiple plot twists reduces the raw materials actors have to work with. Time condensing means characters are pared down to their melodramatic essences: villains, heroes, and imperiled heroines whose fates are predictable before the show’s first floodlights come up. Such a situation is particularly hard on the production’s leads. Though Zack Fine as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and Melissa Molano as French cryptographer Sophie Neveu keep the story progressing while managing piles of technical dialogue, they lack material in the script to develop any human depths in their characters. In such a situation, the cartoonish minor characters offer more to work with, and Todd Waite as Sir Leigh Teabing and Dylan Godwin as his henchman Rémy prove more interesting, though even they are held back by the script’s tight leash. Nevertheless, this is a better fate than that of Chris Hutchison as the murderous Silas and Susan Koozin as Sister Sandrine whose interesting, because grotesque, characters are reduced to cogs in the plot by the need for compression.
And time is compressed. Director Rob Melrose has opted for speeding up the plot events and skimming past much that isn’t absolutely necessary. It’s a pace that can take the audience’s breath away or at least keep them from noticing gaps and improbabilities in the plot—all while bringing our roller coaster to a safe ending.
Perhaps that and the triumphant sets are enough. But audiences may leave the theatre wondering if the production couldn’t have offered more. The show opens with Professor Langdon giving a slide-filled lecture on symbols. It’s a scene barely touched in Brown’s novel, but here it prefaces all the events and includes this line: “Symbols are alive; they can evolve beyond their original meaning.” It’s a truism any student of literature should hold in memory.
But this script, despite frequent reference to symbols, never follows up on it. Instead, perhaps in agreement with Brown’s source novel, the symbols lack life beyond witty second meanings that are generally visible from the balcony. Consequently, Da Vinci’s vaunted code never rises above a riddle whose answer can be found in the back of the book. The production could have handled better material.
Still, as a fast-paced entertainment, the Alley’s “Da Vinci Code” has some sweet, delicious pleasure. Just don’t expect to walk away fully fed.
“The Da Vinci Code” is at Houston’s Alley Theatre through October 19.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.