To create a good hard-boiled noir whodunit, you need a good story — preferably involving murder, money, mysterious temptresses, duplicity and double-crosses, shady jamokes from all levels of society, and plenty of surprise twists. What you also need, however, is a good storyteller fluent in the gritty urban poetry rendered synonymous with the genre by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and, more recently, Robert Parker. The talents of Chicago playwright Douglas Post and British actor Simon Slater together add up to the perfect combination. First, the story: London housing shortages in 1957 put freelance photographer Derek Eveleigh — whose former occupation recording police crime scenes eventually led to his discharge after too many alcohol-fueled blackouts — at a loss to pay his rent until an unseen benefactor offers him a job stalking (but only with his camera) a young West Indian woman. When his subject is brutally gunned down in a public park, the local constabulary shrugs it off with a "that's life in the ghetto" attitude, spurring Eveleigh to conduct his own investigation into the identity of the assailant. His search will acquaint him with three suspects — a ukulele-strumming Irish burlesque comic, a U.S. jazz musician and a Russian restaurateur/prestidigitator — whose conflicting alibis will eventually prove their doom. Now, about our storyteller: That's singular, as in one actor playing all of the above-mentioned characters. This mandates that for two hours (with an intermission/rest break), Slater not only swaps repartee at stichomythic speed in twelve distinct voices encompassing six global dialects, but engages in such physically challenging stunts as grappling with himself for a gun, palming cards with legerdemanic expertise and wailing on a saxophone while crooning a blues ballad appropriately titled "Deadly Eyes." Let's not forget, too, our reluctant shamus's existential crisis at becoming increasingly embroiled in the fate of the exotic enchantress whom he knows (and we see) solely through his Leica's telescopic lens. This would be impressive enough even without I-wish-I'd-said-that lines like "I got a trumpet player with one lip and a drummer who thinks time is a magazine," or the nostalgia invoked by a stage picture period-precise down to the currency paid our gullible shutterbug, the knockoff-New Look fashions worn by post-war working girls, and the razor blades employed for the illusion known in professional circles as "the needles." The fall theater season will soon leave few transfer spaces available. This means that you have only until Sept. 10 to see easily the best entry in the Greenhouse's Solo series so far.
