Pulp on Broadway in a Quaint Kind of Way

Let’s see if we have this right. Quentin Tarantino--tired of being overexposed and taken for granted as Hollywood’s aging bad boy of stylish punk violence--decides to take what someone in the business might still call a stretch. So he makes his professional theater debut as a drug-dealing sadist in a cheeseball ‘60s thriller best remembered as a movie.

Marisa Tomei, who has toiled passionately and fearlessly in off-Broadway and offbeat movies since her perilously premature Oscar for “My Cousin Vinny” six years ago, finally gets to show Broadway how seriously special she is. But her big showcase turns out to be a clunky old piece of junk-food, stunt-stardom entertainment as square as most anything she fled Hollywood to avoid.

Leonard Folgia, whose classy direction of “Master Class” was so subtle and seamless that he got lost in the acclaim for everyone he made look good, gives the commercial theater another chance to discover him. Only this time, he’s supposed to do it with a corpse hanging on a coat hook, thunder and lightning crashes, booga-booga scary-boys-and-girls music and Tarantino lunging out of a dark doorway to slime the lovely and spunky blind girl.

“Wait Until Dark,” which opened Saturday at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre with the impressively gutsy Tomei as the tormented and the, well, game Tarantino as her tormentor, sounds like a funny idea. And it is a pretty funny idea--in a quaint and limited way--so long as you don’t expect anyone to fulfill any real potential here or evoke reactions by anything more visceral than “Boo!”

Audiences raised on pulp fiction and real pulp screen violence can only guess how Frederick Knott’s drama seemed to Broadway in 1966, when Robert Duvall played Harry Roat, the sociopathic brains of a heroin deal, and Lee Remick received a Tony nomination as Susy Hendrix, the blind woman who accidentally gets hold of the stash. Most everyone, however, remembers the creepy and elegant 1967 movie, how Alan Arkin’s slippery Roat actually offended all right-thinking people’s awe of the fragile yet indomitable Audrey Hepburn. This was shameless woman-alone manipulation, sure, but it was high-quality manipulation.

Played now without intermission--no doubt to diminish the seduction of escape--the play seems not creepy but goofy, not elegant but elementary. Tomei is the real thing, a genuine stage creature with an enormously watchable, nervy sense of her own physicality. She is no gorgeous sparrow in the Hepburn--or, we suspect, Remick--mode, but rather a frisky, sexual puppy in a shiny pony tail and tight jeans. Her Susy, left alone by her loving husband in their Lower East Side basement flat on a dark and stormy night, is resourceful but not so self-sufficient that we could not fear for her safety.

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We fear a little for Tarantino, too, though probably not the way he intended. First there were those reviews of the Boston tryout, especially the Globe critic who said the writer-director-movie actor had as much menace as Dennis. Then there are those fans, the new theater audiences who have to be scolded to turn off their cell phones and beepers, and who require barricades at the stage door.

In fact, Tarantino is--here’s a quote for the ads--not so terrible. He’s a stage novice and, though he does a pretty good James Carville imitation in Harry’s first incarnation, his facility with the character’s various disguises is fairly lame. But he does have a useful hulking presence--not to mention that hulking chin--that fills the doorway at his first entrance and gives him an extra appearance of intimidation to call upon when other skills let him down.

We would have thought the casting of Stephen Lang, that stage virtuoso, might throw off the talent balance with his Mike Talman, the crook with a conscience who morphs between a thick-necked New York thug and a sympathetic Southern friend of Susy’s husband (James Whalen). But Lang, who spends at least as much time as Tarantino onstage, is required to use only a few of his expressive colors--and all of them are primary.

Imani Parks is spunky and not too sweet as Gloria, the little girl who lives upstairs. But Foglia--a detective buff who has co-written a mystery novel--directs Lang’s Talman and the other bad guy, Juan Carlos Hernandez’s Carlos, to be as scary as comic-opera villains. Michael McGarty’s set goes for gritty realism in the black-white-and-gray photographer’s apartment. But the room sort of wiggles woozily toward us at the beginning, an amusing touch that sets us up for cartoon irony--as do Brian MacDevitt’s ace strobe-lightning cracks, which sound like clicks of a camera shutter on a slasher Halloween night.

Thus, despite the intricately choreographed violence and attention to detail, there is an uneasy tone that makes it hard to take seriously and leaves us in the dark about how we are meant to take it at all.