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Regional Reviews: St. Louis Professor House Also see Richard's reviews of It Shoulda Been You and The Minutes
Jacob Juntunen's Professor House, in a world premiere production by Contraband Theatre, is a fresh new science fiction yarn that runs neck-and-neck with a very impressive ghost story, under the excellent direction of Sam Hayes. And it's hard to guess which narrative will finally win out. A yearning for normality puts us on a path toward the bizarre, as climate change grows worse and worse. But you'll be surprised at how easily all the characters, twenty years from now, have learned to shrug off each new bout of devastating weather. They accept higher government carbon taxes for the dubious luxury of a dream house with a new fireplace, among other indulgences. And that "come what may" attitude adds to the tension. The two hour show (with intermission) is studded with even darker compulsions: living characters are summarily yanked around like puppets by a ghost (Maida Dippel as Tommi); as a brooding professor of poetry, Godfrey ("Peter") St. Peter, played by Ben Ritchie, falls prey to Tommi, the same invisible muse. His family offers him love and comfort, but remains walled-off from his own internal demons. The spirit of doom and the specter of loss are all around, like a modern Poe story, in spite of the miracles of technology. A strange new world of monsoons and uninhabitable regions and agricultural collapse pervades. Mostly in the background, climate change makes for a great cauldron into which playwright Juntunen throws some very different spells and hexes. Professor House pulls you ahead with the torque of a modern electric car, accelerating much faster than you'd expect. Plot and stagecraft and implication are thrown out ahead of us all at once, like handfuls of tennis balls before an eager puppy. It's super-taut and madly engrossing as we put the story together on the fly, struggling to pierce an elegant dramatic "opacity" in the first few scenes. A sense of urgency fills the theater. Mr. Ritchie peels off the edges of his last layer of sanity, referencing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," even as he struggles to preserve one tiny corner of natural beauty in his world. Here and there, his eyes glimmer with strange inspiration. But elsewhere, you can sense him drowning in the memory of losing a child in a crowd. Overall, it's the story of a wise man stampeded up into his own belfry, echoing our own fears as well. Claire Coffey is patient but also a genre study in helplessness as his mathematician wife Lillian. And Sadie Harvey is uneasily pulled into his funk as their daughter Rosamond. Ron Baker portrays the couple's very affable son-in-law, Louie, whose cheerfulness only serves to isolate the poet further. Like any good horror story, the hand of fate pushes them all along on a perfectly spooky set by Eric Kuhn. Through it all, the living are turning into specters as well, thanks to an extremely lucrative invention by Tommi before she died. "The Lens" is a miniaturized, wearable holographic projector. And thanks to that leap forward, your own spectral hologram can now appear in real time anywhere around the world. But I'm suddenly not sure how I feel about that, after seeing this particular ghost story. The most personal haunting may belong to Tommi herself existing as a living "ghost" in her own past mortal life: first as an orphan in the "Outlands" (the deadly hot desert of the southwest); and later when she's powerless to halt the destruction of a sacred Native American archaeological site; or after that, struggling to get into a PhD program, in spite of her own mathematical genius. Taijha Silas adds gentle skeins of heartbreak as her lover. And occasional shrieks of madness punctuate the show's strangely beautiful failed warmth, amidst a sort of blue-violet of rising melancholy. Why would you subject yourself to all this? Perhaps because it makes us feel so much stronger by the end. Professor House, produced by Contraband Theatre, runs through October 25, 2025, at the Chapel on Alexander, 6238 Alexander Dr., St. Louis MO. For tickets and information, please visit www.contrabandtheatre.org Cast (in order of appearance): Production Staff: |
