Vetting Hitchcock’s psyche

ON first glance, Terry Johnson looks like central casting’s idea of a brilliant but possibly malign scientist. There’s something of Superman’s nemesis, Lex Luthor, in his pale, shaven head, and strange eyeglasses with blatant, angular black frames intensify the unsettling effect.

In fact, the 50-year-old British playwright and director is a personable enough sort, sprinkling his conversation with quick-paced sallies of dry wit. Nevertheless, he knows that “Hitchcock Blonde,” one of his every-decade-or-so reintroductions to Southern California theater audiences, could mark him as someone a little, well, unsavory.

After chatting for an hour about the play, which is having its U.S. premiere at South Coast Repertory, Johnson feels compelled to make a wry closing request: “Please don’t make me sound like a complete pervert. That’s all I ask. Make it sound more amusing than pervy.”

The play has the potential to be both. The pleasures of an intellectual-quest mystery are there, as Alex, a 50-ish professor at a British university, and Jennifer, an American student in her 20s, jet off to a Greek island villa to examine canisters of long-lost celluloid that Hitchcock shot in 1919, at the beginning of his career. The silent film snippets -- a fictitious element in a show that liberally incorporates true details from Hitchcock’s life -- reveal a blond beauty under the direction of the 20-year-old cinematic master-to-be. For Alex and Jennifer, these remnants of a never-made film constitute Hitchcock’s Proustian pastry, his Rosebud sled -- the hidden psychological proof that explains why the director repeatedly made beautiful blond actresses suffer and scream on-screen. Witness the shower-stall stabbing of Janet Leigh in “Psycho,” Kim Novak’s tumble from a lofty bell tower in “Vertigo,” and Tippi Hedren falling afoul of a razor-beaked pecking order in “The Birds.”

“Hitchcock Blonde” also sports a humorous will-she-or-won’t-she power game and sexual dance between the prof and his student -- as well as a parallel duet, set in 1959 during the filming of “Psycho,” in which we see Hitchcock prodding Leigh’s body double to go naked for his lens, both in a bathtub on the film set, and in a private, after-hours audition at his home.

The idea of writing a play about Hitchcock jangled in Johnson’s head for three years. It coalesced into a story only after he realized that it wasn’t Hitchcock’s films that most fascinated him but the quality of obsessiveness the director’s work embodied. That obsessiveness, Johnson found, had completely infected the Hitchcock experts whose books he was consuming.

“I wondered, ‘Why is “obsession” a word which seems to hover around this man?’ And the obvious answers were that he is an obsessive, and he obsesses on things which are quite primal -- death and sex.”

Johnson too was sucked into the obsessive orbit. He wrote about five plot strands before summoning actors for a reading, then winnowed the narrative to three parts he could weave together. The play flashes among the unfinished film of 1919, Hitchcock’s fixation with the “Psycho” body double in 1959, and Alex and Jennifer’s mutual academic quest and sexual tug of war in 1999.

Midway through the writing, Johnson decided he needed to be overt in staging violence, nudity and sex. He says he wanted to make himself and the audience “complicit” in the strange voyeurism and manipulation we see Hitchcock enact with the body double (Hitchcock is played by Dakin Matthews, an acclaimed L.A. actor recently seen doppelgangering Dick Cheney in David Hare’s “Stuff Happens” at the Mark Taper Forum).

‘Is she naked, or is she a nude?’

FOR Johnson, “Hitchcock Blonde” is “about men being trapped behind their own eyes.... and women being trapped in front of [men’s] eyes.” He wants the play to raise questions that he knows may cause queasiness as Hitchcock and Alex try to strip women down to constructs that tickle their particular obsessions. The flesh-baring sequences, Johnson says, are designed to be “long enough for people to consider, ‘Is she naked, or is she a nude? Is that a woman being humiliated, or is that a woman being transformed? Is that a transcendent being, or an oppressed being?’ ”

He says he heard no complaints from Hitchcock-philes during the play’s original production three years ago in England. “Hitchcock Blonde” premiered at the nonprofit Royal Court Theatre -- which has nurtured Johnson since his breakthrough in 1982 -- then transferred for a commercial run in the West End.

David Emmes, South Coast’s producing artistic director, got the script while the show was still playing in London and immediately wanted to stage it in Costa Mesa. South Coast had struck up a relationship with Johnson in 1986, when Emmes directed the U.S. premiere of his play “Unsuitable for Adults,” whose protagonist is a female English comedian resembling a distaff, taboo-breaking Lenny Bruce. With “Hitchcock Blonde,” Emmes was intrigued by the ambitious use of film and still projections that British critics have credited with capturing a Hitchcockian menace and beauty. Johnson, who is directing his own show, as he often does, is using William Dudley, the same set, costume and video designer employed in London.

“There never was a successful use, to my mind, of film in theater,” Emmes says. “One always dominated the other, and it seemed the two art forms didn’t complement each other too well.” The script’s fundamental reliance on film -- “it’s a story that simply couldn’t be told without it,” Emmes says -- and the praise lavished on the London production’s visuals, made him think “Hitchcock Blonde” could be different. Plus, it made sense to bring a play about Alfred Hitchcock to Southern California, where the director, who became a U.S. citizen, spent most of his career after emigrating from England in 1939.

The London reviews for “Blonde” were largely favorable, led by Michael Billington of the Guardian, who called it “a continually gripping play” offering “both an elegant reconstruction and intelligent deconstruction of Hitchcock’s work.”

Johnson broke through in 1982 with “Insignificance” (later made into a film by Nicolas Roeg), which won him an award for most promising British playwright and established his frequent method of inventing stories around famous figures -- in that case, Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. “Hysteria” (1993) was an ideas-centered farce in which the dying Sigmund Freud confronts his legacy (the Taper staged it in 1995), and “Dead Funny” (1994) concerned British comedy buffs in mourning for Benny Hill. “Hysteria” and “Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick,” a 1998 show about “Carry On,” a popular British slapstick film series, won Olivier awards for best comedy.

Johnson had hoped that Broadway would leap at “Hitchcock Blonde” but admits that he’s still under the stigma of the critical drubbing suffered four years ago by his only Broadway production, “The Graduate.”

Kathleen Turner famously did an ultra-brief nude turn as Mrs. Robinson in the show, which Johnson directed and adapted from the Charles Webb novel on which the 1967 movie version with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft was based. “The Graduate” earned respectful notices when first mounted in London, but there were no coo-coo-ca-choos from the New York reviewers. They didn’t merely hate Johnson’s version but questioned its reason for existing. When the show subsequently came to L.A. with Jerry Hall doffing a towel as Mrs. Robinson, The Times deemed the production “creepy” and “crassly commercial” and accused it of “cheapening the story.”

Johnson’s defense: American critics seem to regard the film as holy, and nobody understood that he was staging the novel, not the movie. “It was bizarre. For all the negativity, what kept a smile on my face was that Charles Webb loves it.”

Nevertheless, after such a colossal critical failure, Johnson readily concedes that he is “absolutely” damaged goods in the eyes of the New York theater. He can live with that. “Listen, I’m busy. It’s not going to break my heart.”

Not that his heart is unbreakable. It turns out that there was a Johnson Blonde too -- a fair-haired lass in the town of Bushey who was a few grades ahead of him.

“I asked Laura Philpott to the cinema halfway up Finch Lane. I would have been 16. My first rejected romantic advance.”

His deep, grainy voice modulates upward and brightens as he goes deeper into memory about his Blonde, finding fresh connections with his current play and his chosen career. “I first saw her playing the heroine in a school production of ‘Sweeney Todd,’ which I believe had lots of violence in it, if not a lot of sex,” he recalls. “But Laura Philpott in that lilac frock was a lot of sex. Laura Philpott, lit like cut glass. So I guess, yeah, my first romantic obsession is tied up with theater. That’s interesting. I haven’t thought this out, but I think she’s got [a lot] to do with the whole damn thing.”

*

‘Hitchcock Blonde’

Where: South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Wednesdays to Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 12

Price: $28 to $58

Contact: (714) 708-5555