Jigsaw Puzzle

By T. E. Kalem

VERONICA'S ROOM

by IRA LEVIN

In one sort of suspense thriller, the audience is let in on a secret that the characters do not know. In another, the characters possess some piece of knowledge that the audience is in the dark about. Inadvertently, Ira Levin has written a mystery in which his characters seem to know something that has eluded him. Veronica's Room poses a puzzle in the first act and tries to resolve it with three or four new puzzles in the second act. Result: frustration.

Despite its ultimate failure, the play is not badly written, and an air of expectancy, abetted by expert performances, hovers over it. A girl (Regina Barf) and a boy (Kipp Osborne) out on their first date are lured to a musty mansion in a Boston suburb by a middle-aged man and wife (Eileen Heckart and Arthur Kennedy) who act as caretakers of the estate. There the girl is slyly coaxed into impersonating an invalid named Veronica in a dress of 1935 vintage.

What happens to the girl is, understandably, the reviewer's secret. One flaw that may safely be mentioned is that while the caretakers try in every way to convince the girl that the time is 1935 and not 1973, they never succeed. If the girl plausibly believed that she was losing her mind, the play might have achieved some of the tingling suspense of Gaslight.

Playwright Levin develops the weirdness of his characters at the expense of their motivations. Thus incest, necrophilia and schizophrenic identity shifts enter the picture without clarifying it. This is a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces.

T. E. Kalem

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