Hitch just a subplot in overstuffed ‘Blonde’

A brainy bit of titillation, salted with some deep thoughts on Hollywood’s dark powers and the unseemly genius of the famously morbid British director, Terry Johnson’s “Hitchcock Blonde” at South Coast Repertory sets out to examine what motivated the man who made “Psycho,” as well as what motivates the millions affected by his work. Coming, as it does, in the blinding hype of Oscar season, a play with so much on its mind is enticing, even if in the end Johnson’s fractured storytelling devices result in a chaotic rumination on our film fan society more than a satisfying drama.

Johnson, a Brit who earlier adapted “The Graduate” for the West End and has directed this U.S. premiere of his latest play, has grafted a clever quick-study portrait of Hitchcock onto a main story of a scheming “media studies” professor and a nubile student he has lured to a Greek island ostensibly to help reconstruct an early, unfinished 16-millimeter Hitchcock film found moldering in the cellar of a villa there. As the troubled cross-generational relationship unfolds between the aging professor, Alex (Robin Sachs), and Jennifer (Adriana DeMeo), his bright but emotionally damaged acolyte, we return in alternating scenes to the 1959 world of Hitchcock himself (Dakin Matthews), engaged in preparing the body-double blond (Sarah Aldrich) for the shower scene in “Psycho.”

The egg-shaped auteur is first glimpsed in magisterial repose at dinner, delineating in wonderfully creepy detail the attributes of the fish under his knife, a Dover sole that he informs us enthusiastically is a bottom feeder, “its sole purpose to transmute necrotic matter into angelic fish.” That this quite possibly could serve as a metaphorical description of the director himself is one of Johnson’s nicer bits of monologue.

It helps that Matthews is spot-on great as Hitchcock, delivering the director’s arch pronouncements with lower lip curled in perfectly pompous disdain while he totters around the stage like a bloated penguin. It’s a piece of top-drawer mimicry that is terrific fun while it lasts.

The problem is that the scenes with Mathews doing Hitchcock are by far the most interesting, and once it becomes clear that these are just a backdrop for the other less-compelling story of the professor grappling with middle age while slyly seducing his student, a pall begins to set in.

There is an odd subplot involving the wan body double, who tries to apply Hitchcock’s murderous cinema logic to her own tabloid life. But what keeps the play’s engine running are two other devices. The first is the detective story having to do with the frame-by-frame restoration of the lost film that appears to hold the key to the director’s fascination with endangered blonds. The second is the anticipation that the body double is finally going to have to disrobe, complying with Hitchcock’s professional instructions.

Eventually Aldrich does shed all for the director and the Orange County audience -- actually twice, though in real life, Hitch clues us, there were 17 takes, not two. On Saturday night, a few patrons walked out in evident displeasure at this carnal denouement.

In truth, the play is anything but erotic, emphasizing the dullness and tedium of the shot-making process even when it involves nudity. This is not news, but it’s probably a point worth making again regarding the man whose oeuvre is distinguished by its unabashed voyeurism.

“Hitchcock Blonde” is neither worshipful nor debunking of Hitchcock, though one suspects the playwright’s view might be found in the words of the smart and irreverent Jennifer, who rebukes Alex with the judgment that their subject made a few great films “and the rest were mediocre.” But, in the words of Alex, he was also a visionary, the first man to realize that the lure of cinema would be in showing us “those things we shouldn’t be looking at.”

The production is notably married to its subject in its staging, the various settings on the Greek isle projected on screens stretched beneath a frame of enlarged celluloid. A fake rainstorm fills the window of the professor’s office, and there’s a virtual nude shower scene provided by hologram. The sound of the “screaming violins” so favored by Hitchcock cover the scene changes.

Among the cast, the two actresses could be better. Martin Noyes has hardly any lines as the hulking blue-collar husband of the Blonde. Sachs, recalling a younger Ian McKellen, brings a palpable ennui to his smoothly unsympathetic character.

There is some fine writing here, along with a formidable intelligence and a sharp sense of humor. Yet Johnson hasn’t located a narrative structure that adequately serves his gifts.

*

“Hitchcock Blonde”

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

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Wednesdays through 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

Running Time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

Sarah Aldrich...Blonde

Adriana DeMeo...Jennifer

Dakin Matthews...Hitch

Martin Noyes...Husband

Robin Sachs...Alex

Written and directed by Terry Johnson. Sets, costumes and video design by William Dudley. Lighting by Chris Parry. Composer, sound Ian Dickinson. Production manager Jeff Gifford