by Kristian Lin

It's hard to do horror in the theater. The medium of film is much easier to manipulate, with visual tricks and sound that surrounds the moviegoer. It's also much easier to do horror in a novel or short story, as the reader's imagination can supply the spectacularly uncanny sights or an atmosphere thick with dread. On stage, it's hard to achieve the kind of immediacy the genre needs. Generally, an actor in the theater (as opposed to one on film) is too solid a presence for an audience to accept as a ghost or an evil spirit, while using stage machinery to mimic supernatural events usually looks clunky. The great triumph of Circle Theatre's production of The Woman in Black is in the skillful way its production values overcome these obstacles.

Adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from a novel by Susan Hill, the play is set in the 19th century, as Arthur Kipps (John Wayne Shafer) tries to give a staged reading of his manuscript. He has hired an unnamed actor (Ashley Wood) to help him rehearse in an otherwise empty theater. As they stage the events in Kipps' story, the actor plays the part of Kipps, while Kipps himself plays an assortment of characters. The play-within-the-play functions as an extended flashback that retells Kipps' journey to a deserted house in a remote corner of England. His firm sends him there to sort through the affairs of the place's owner, a recently deceased widow who was their client. Alone in a dead woman's house, he starts to have horrible visions of a ghostly woman in black.

The story treads familiar territory, with a civilized London gentleman out of his element, an isolated house owned by a socially outcast woman, a long-buried family secret and local folks who are too terrified to speak directly of the horrors or go near the place. Kipps also proves to be maddeningly uncurious as to what he's dealing with; why isn't he more persistent in questioning the townsfolk about the ghostly woman? The framing story only piles cliche on top of cliche, as it spends an inordinate amount of time building toward a thuddingly predictable anticlimax of the oh-the-actress-didn't-show-up-today variety.

These turn out to be small flaws, however, in an extraordinarily potent horror show. The lion's share of the credit should go to director George H. Brown, stage manager Seth Johnston and lighting designer John Leach. The set, which is almost entirely black, not only suggests many different locales, but also proves indispensable to the artful misdirection that makes the play so nerve-wracking. The woman in black seems able to pop up anywhere at any time, and her manifestations are scary even though, like Kipps, you're not sure why. Early on, Kipps (played by the actor) is in a cemetery when she suddenly appears no more than 10 feet away from him, walking toward him. Then, just as suddenly, she disappears into proverbially thin air, as the actor runs to the spot where she just was, only to find that she's nowhere to be seen. The production design crew manages these miracles of stagecraft silently and efficiently, without bombast or cheap theatrics, and the matter-of-fact quality of the ghostly visitations only adds to their horrific quality.

Schafer and Wood turn in excellent performances, and the former may be too good, as Arthur Kipps morphs from a novice actor who drones his lines into a master of accents and mannerisms. Granted, we're meant to take Schafer as the various characters within his story rather than as Arthur Kipps. Nevertheless, the play could have used more of a sense of Kipps as a self-conscious (albeit talented) beginner giving a performance. Nevertheless, this brilliantly told horror story is perfect viewing for the Halloween season.