Over the last twenty years, Chicago's Lifeline Theater has essayed mysteries by Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister, 1993) and Donald Westlake (Trust Me On This, 2002), in addition to such seemingly impossible, page-to-stage transformations as Jules Verne's Around The World In Eighty Days, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and, between 1996 and 2001, all three books of The Lord Of The Rings.
But with the critically-acclaimed production of Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body? in 2001, followed in 2004 by the Joseph Jefferson Award-winning stage adaptation of Strong Poison,adapter and Lifeline company member Frances Limoncelli found herself formulating plans for a play series featuring amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey and mystery-novelist Harriet Vane.
This summer, Limoncelli's adaptation of Gaudy Night will highlight the latter's efforts to uncover a vandalizing terrorist at Oxford University's Women's College.
MARY SHEN BARNIDGE: We yankees usually like our detectives humble, homely and hard-working. Wimsey is a hobbyist, with inherited wealth and a title to open doors for him. What makes him appeal to American audiences today?
FRANCES LIMONCELLI: Well, there's the Prince Charming factor. His aristocratic blood serves to enhances his unattainability -- an important part of any prince. Lord Peter is the literary woman's ideal man: He's intelligent, scholarly, athletic, funny and rich. He's also passionate, sensitive, vulnerable and has just enough emotional baggage to give him an air of mystery, high up on his pedestal, perfect and unreachable -- until he meets Harriet, of course.
BARNIDGE: What attracted you to the idea of adapting the Wimsey stories for the stage?
LIMONCELLI: Sayers' brilliant dialogue, her quirky characters and her observations of her own social context. Her wit and her humor is extremely engaging -- possibly the reason male readers are willing to forgive her romanticizing Lord Peter.
BARNIDGE: Since you didn't know that you were going to do more of the Wimsey stories, what made you choose Whose Body? for your initial effort?
LIMONCELLI: I originally wanted to do Gaudy Night, but the enthusiasm of the [Lifeline] ensemble made me propose some of her earlier books as well. Whose Body? was Sayers' introduction of Lord Peter, so I thought it should be ours, too. And I thought Sayers was rather prescient in creating a villain, Dr. Julian Freke, who was an anti- Semite in the years between the wars. I focused on this characteristic so that I could contrast Freke with Lord Peter. Both of them are fascinated with the human mind, but Freke is a sort of pre-Nazi -- a menace immediately recognizable to modern audiences. I saw them as two opposing moral extremes in a battle which Lord Peter is in danger of losing as a result of his wartime episodes.
BARNIDGE: Why Strong Poison for the "sequel"? Because the villain is also of noble birth? Because we get to see beneath Peter's sang-froid? Because [Lifeline company members] Peter Greenberg and Jennifer Tyler generate such marvelous chemistry?
LIMONCELLI: Sayers needed Wimsey to grow if he was to remain interesting, and so he fell in love. Peter and Harriet are a perfect match of sensibilities, and that is very stageworthy! Most of their scenes together are reproduced intact from the book as a centerpiece for the play. Because they are the play's heartbeat! They might not have much to do with the action, but they remind us why we are trying to solve this mystery. In addition, Strong Poison had so many elements that make for delightful stage business -- the physical comedy of Miss Climpson's seances and Miss Murchison's searches, Bunter performing Marsh's tests, Urquhardt eating Turkish Delight.
BARNIDGE: The whole notion of female undercover agents in that period is noteworthy. Also all those boho radicals that Wimsey interviews.
LIMONCELLI: And not a stereotypical ingenue in the bunch! Sayers' pre-feminist women are SO different from those in most of the fiction of that time and genre. They've chosen unconventional lifestyles, and so have the men who have chosen to love them, outside the boundaries of their society's approval. I decided early in my process that no character in Strong Poison would be without opinions, if only in support of the old ways of thinking that act as an obstacle to the new. I had to cut a lot of wonderful material, but I think it was necessary to focus the play's action.
BARNIDGE: What was the hardest part of adapting Sayers' stories for the stage?
LIMONCELLI: Mysteries in general are problematic because they have to follow a linear trail -- information, clues, theories and discoveries -- leading to the conclusion. But while the step-by-step procedural is imperative, ultimately, it's just the form. For me, it's the characters who drive the play -- their social milieu, who they are and what they want.
BARNIDGE: And Sayers' personalities are so individualized -- but there are an awful lot of them.
LIMONCELLI: Yes. Sayers always creates a string of delightful people who appear once and then go away, never to return. You can do this in a book, but in a play, you wouldn't get to know anyone well enough to care about them. Besides, how many wigs can one actor wear before it becomes silly? So I couldn't just cut one scene from the book. In most cases, I had to cut four scenes and then write a new one that included all information from the missing four -- and in the right order, mind you, and in a voice that matched Sayers'.
BARNIDGE: Peter and Harriet shared the onstage time in Strong Poison. But in this story, Peter doesn't even appear until late in the story.
LIMONCELLI: That's certainly true. But Harriet tends to brood when she's alone, and Lord Peter is so much in her thoughts that he becomes a kind of metaphysical presence.
BARNIDGE: How so?
LIMONCELLI: Sayers has laid out a social conflict even timelier now than in her own day. Can a woman expect love without sacrificing the independence she has fought to develop? Can an intelligent woman find a man who doesn't feel threatened by that trait? Does working in a man's world make one unwomanly and unfit for marriage? Harriet asks herself these questions -- indeed, they provide the whole crux of the conflict, not mention the villain's motive.
BARNIDGE: Gaudy Night is set in the women's college at Oxford University -- that's a lot of architecture to replicate on a stage measuring 28 X 30 feet.
LIMONCELLI: I think the setting is what makes this story unique. Oxford isn't just the narrative background, it's a palpable force -- almost a character in itself. It's where Harriet rediscovers the person she was before she became the woman whom we meet in Strong Poison. Her reconnection with her scholarly accomplishments renders her equal in that aspect, if not in wealth or position, to Lord Peter -- whose own academic achievements add dimension to her previous image of him as a frivolous playboy. I think it's more important to capture these themes, and feelings, than to map out the geographical particulars.
BARNIDGE: And after all, this is the theatre company that put the entire battle of Gettysburg on that same stage for The Killer Angels last year. Speaking of which, you aren't going to keep all of Harriet's academic colleagues in the script, are you?
LIMONCELLI: No, I had to give the Dean most of the Warden's important business. I kept the Misses Lydgate, De Vine, Hillyard and Goodwin -- giving them certain speeches and mannerisms attributed to others in the book. Two scouts and one student made the cut. And the male characters, in addition to Peter, are his young nephew, as well as the visiting Lord Chancellor and the stalwart porter.
BARNIDGE: Are we going to see the events of the Gaudy?
LIMONCELLI: No. Harriet is going to recount the plot points to Peter over dinner in London. Many audience members may not know Harriet and Peter, or what they mean to each other. The dinner will set up who they are, what they want -- or don't want -- from one another, a little of their history, and then, that Harriet went to a class reunion called a Gaudy where some strange things happened.
BARNIDGE: I recall the scene in Strong Poison where Miss Murchison climbs the file cabinets -- in high heels yet! -- as if they were a jungle-jim. Will Gaudy Night have any stunts like that?
LIMONCELLI: You don't think I'm going to tell now, do you? Seriously, this book, and play, is more a tale of suspense than it is the pursuit of the Bad by the Good. So of course, we still plan to have chilling spectacle sufficient to -- I hope -- elevate everybody's heartbeat by intermission.
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