Play within a play Private Eyes, at the Hipp, is an intricate tale of theatre, love and lust.

Gregory Jones & Karla Mason

After moving audiences to tears with his Lonely Planet and then scaring them out of their libidos with his adaptation of Dracula, Dietz now offers us his tour de force, Private Eyes, a play within a play within a play. 

Theatre audiences are, by nature, more knowing than movie audiences. There are only so many tricks you can pull on a bare stage with words as your only tools. And besides, we’ve been going to the theater for 2,500 years; the movies were born in this century. The irony is that our accumulated intelligence makes us an easy mark for a skilled tactician like Dietz. 

"Our audience at the Hipp is exceptional," says Private Eyes director Mary Hausch. "They love a challenge." 

Marked by a skillful combination of dramatic devices, the careful arrangement of incidents, the use of withheld information and startling reversals, Dietz calls Private Eyes "a comedy of suspicion." But the suspicions are largely ours. 

"A play about lies must be a comedy because only laughter can make us recognize the truths that we’re not fond of," Dietz says. 

"You can see the audience thinking," Hausch observes. "They have to participate in the play intellectually. But they’re not so much working through it as they are just playing along cerebrally." 

It begins with our shared milieu – the theatre. The characters are Matthew and Lisa (Timothy Altmeyer and Karla Mason), actor and actress, man and wife, and their director, Adrian Poynter (Gregg Jones). They are rehearsing a play, we presume. 

Our reasoning is inductive. We leap to conclusions and fall into traps. If this is a rehearsal studio, then this must be a rehearsal, right? 

Hausch laughs. "After all these years, our audience is finally going to see the back wall of the Hippodrome. I wonder if some of them will think it’s a set we built, that there’s really something else behind it." 

Of course there is something else behind the wall. It’s called the real world, and when we match it against the conventions of make-believe, we see the characters onstage as stand-ins for ourselves. 

"Don’t you believe we project our loved ones?" Lisa is asked at her audition. "Don’t you believe we form a picture in our heads and then cast a picture like a shadow onto the person we’re with? Don’t you think the lover we imagine is actually more real than the one who stands before us?" 

Perhaps. But how much credence can we invest in lines spoken by a character in a play within a play? These people are actors. They assume the personalities of others, they exist behind figurative masks. 

At some point, however, this intellectual exercise must trigger an emotional response. We search for substance. Without it, all is vapidity. As Hemingway would have it: Writers writing about writers are about as interesting as painters would be if all they painted was other painters. 

So, Dietz throws a couple of wild cards into the deck – two characters who are seemingly not theatre folk. One of them is played by Nell Page Sexton, and her identity is better left undisclosed to keep from spoiling the suspense. The other is a psychiatrist named Frank, played with aplomb by Sara Morsey. 

The French have a word for the role Frank fills; they call it the raisonneur. Frank is that character we turn to for reason and truth. As she herself directly tells the audience: "I’m the only one who can be trusted with this story." 

So we trust Frank. "Frank is our touchstone," says Hausch. "We turn to her for strength and stability, two qualities that Sara projects so glowingly." Then Hausch sighs, revealingly "I hated to lose my touchstone. I got to the end of the play the first time and I thought I had it figured out. But, of course Dietz had to trick me too." 

What Dietz does so fascinatingly in Private Eyes is to construct each dramatic beat as an independent unit. Thus, Private Eyes becomes many plays. The trick to making it a work of art, of course, is for the whole to somehow be more than just the sum of its parts. 

It starts with Timothy Altmeyer. His Matthew won’t be found on the pages of Dietz’s script. Those are just the words he says. The inflections and the twists Altmeyer gives to his lines and the vibrant physicality he brings to the role create a Matthew we care about. 

"I started my casting with Tim," confides Hausch, who worked with Altmeyer on Mineola Twins. "I was aware that the character could come across as bland if I didn’t cast an actor who had intensity. That was crucial. Tim’s got incredible intensity. He’s also intuitive. And he makes such big choices." 

Matched against Matthew’s naivete is a seductiveness we recognize – that of Karla Mason, who lit Stanley Kowalski’s fire as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Hipp last spring. But here, we see seductiveness seduced. 

"There is a vulnerability to Karla that an older man, a director like Adrian Poynter, could easily take advantage of," notes Hausch, alluding to the character played by Gregg Jones – a prototypical manipulative director who chastises actors, telling them, "I’ll tell you what I’m looking for when I see it." 

Jones makes Adrian more than a prototype. His energy burns just beneath the surface. "Working with Gregg is always fun," says Hausch. "He’s so creative you practically have to tie him up." It’s a good thing, because this script ties him up in knots. 

Best of all is Nell Page Sexton, who plays the mystery woman. "Dietz never clarifies who she is or where she’s going," Hausch concedes. "She’s got to be alluring and dangerous at the same time. Nell is so good at playing extremes, but always with dimension, with depth."