PLAINVIEW — One gets the impression about halfway through "Scarlet Woman" that this isn't so much a play as a mash-up of late-night viewing on the Turner Classic Movies channel.
The play, which opened over the weekend at the Jon Hassler Theater in Plainview, pays homage to, and pokes fun at, the plots, characters and actors of old gangster movies and murder mysteries. It pulls the story line from this movie, the voices from another, the murder weapon of choice from a third and the names of victims from yet a fourth. Fans of old movies will have a blast; the rest of us will try — too hard, probably — to sort out the bewildering flurry of crimes, connivers and coppers.
The play is directed by Daniel Ellis and Rob O'Neill and co-stars Candy Simmons, of Minneapolis-based SunsetGun Productions , from a script by Matthew Wells. Simmons and Katherine Kupiecki, the only two actors in the show, play a number of characters, both male and female. They change costume accessories (a scarf here, a hat there) on the fly and deliver rapid-fire dialog with lines like "I refuse to be shot by anyone younger than my scotch" and "It isn't murder when they're asking for it."
Simmons is an accomplished artist who can range from childlike to hard-boiled, while Kupiecki has a particular talent for sketching in darker characters. Both relish occasionally indulging in the kind of overly dramatic posing that was common in film noir.
On the other hand, there are so many characters, and so few of them on stage for more than a few minutes at a time, that the audience is sometimes left exasperated while trying to remember who is who.
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The secret, of course, it not to think too much, but rather to simply enjoy the ride. This is, after all, a spoof. "Scarlet Woman," which is barely an hour in length, is not intended to be serious. It's not supposed to provoke deep contemplation. It might, however, send you back to your favorite midnight movie channel.
