Playwright: Keith Huff. At: Writers' Theatre, 664 Vernon, Glencoe. Tickets: 847-242-6000; www.writerstheatre.org; $50-$60. Runs through: July 31
Three years ago, playwright Keith Huff had an immense success with his two-character Chicago cop drama, A Steady Rain. Huff's successor play in some ways flips the coin of that one: The Detective's Wife focuses on a woman who's homicide detail husband has been gunned down in an Uptown alley, the same locale as much of the action in A Steady Rain, but this one is a one-character play and definitely a ghost story, too.
It's stylish stuff in text and performance. Huff's writing is extremely intelligent, literate, smart and entertaining with references to Lewis Carroll, Hamlet and psychology which fall easily upon the ear without pretensions. In due course, recently-widowed Alice Conroy peels back layers of herself as she discovers just how much she's prepared to do for love and honor ... and cracks a cold case, to boot! As with most great detective stories, this one really is a metaphysical examination of secrecy, grief, truth, different realities, personal devotion and having a voice—literally. Conroy walks a fine line between perception and hysteria, saying at the outset that most of us are caught between "tightly-framed delusion and Through the Lookingglass chaos." The viewer must decide to which side of the scale Conroy herself tips.
As Alice Conroy, veteran Chicago leading lady Barbara Robertson brings her considerable vivacity and charm to the role and scores a personal triumph by any measure. She's a joy to watch as guided by director Gary Griffin, who pauses between musicals and large productions to show he can modulate an extremely intimate vehicle just as well.
Griffin has overseen a team of designers who add immeasurably to the production with Kevin Depinet's atmospheric, book-filled set so beautifully lit by Heather Gilbert. There is a moment when Robertson, just inches from the audience, faces into a pale yellow light with her wide eyes outlined in black and pale skin, and it might as well be a framed Impressionist masterpiece. Writers' Theatre consistently brings astonishing visual imagination to its tiny, tiny original 50-seat space in the back room of Books-on-Vernon, this time greatly assisted by Mike Tutaj's projections and a really fine music-and-soundscape by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, past masters of the art.
All that being said, if you saw A Steady Rain and are expecting the same sort of punch-in-the-guts grittiness, you won't find it. The Detective's Wife has a more lady-like temperament, definitely more sly humor and also an ethereal quality, perhaps because of its ghostly element. A one-person work, too, always is going to seem more contrived than a multi-character play—because it is! It's a hazard of the form. Still, the production is a jewel and Huff's language is lovely.
