Patricia Highsmith, the author of, among many other novels, Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mister Ripley, died alone in a hospital near Tenga, Switzerland on February 4, 1995. She had lived there, an expatriate, for many years, continuing to write (typewrite) her sinister tales while carping about all sorts of things—authors she disliked (Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe), Jews and blacks, but also while making a welcome home for pet snails(!).
For Switzerland, the playwright Joanna Murray-Smith incorporates some but not all of the above facts. Rather like Highsmith, who veered from the truth when she felt it served her purpose, Murray-Smith has macabre fun with a fantasy about a writer she obviously adores for that fertile, furtive mind.
Dispensing with what she knows of the thriller writer’s life in the 1990s, Murray-Smith introduces her verbally combative (physically combative, too?) Highsmith on the 1994 morning a young man announcing himself as Edward Ridgeway arrives as emissary from the contrary woman’s publishers.
Despite the immediate objections Highsmith (Peggy J. Scott) hurls, the initially uncertain lad (Daniel Petzold) insists he won’t leave until she has signed a contract obligating her to compose yet another likely to be commercial manuscript in the beloved Ripley series.
Though seriously attempting to throw the lad out of the chalet (it sure looks like one) that faces the snowy Alps (James J. Fenton is the designer), the now determined lad does some talking that’s almost as fast as Highsmith’s and manages to wangle an overnight stay.
Whereupon Highsmith and this Ridgeway person move into a folie à deux that has her unceasingly extemporizing to get him off-balance. She barks, “From the moment you walked through the door, I could see that you brought the slapdash of America with you…Americans like you—and Americans are like you—think “close enough” is good enough. It’s a kind of national callow youth.”
Just how callow this Edward is, however, has yet to be established. For this is playwright Murray-Smith, who’s clearly influenced by Highsmith, paying rapt homage to her idol. Murray-Smith is taking off from the psychological perceptions on which Highsmith builds her stories. (Does the shared Smith moniker have anything to do with the bonding?) Who’s who here and who might eventually do what to whom becomes the mounting suspense.
Certainly, patrons mustn’t ignore the details. How about the swords resting on the wall above the fire place? How about the report this increasingly temperate fellow brings about a predecessor claiming he’d been threatened in the night by a knife-wielding Highsmith? How about the cut on the neck the boy has acquired on his second morning?
Saying much more about what transpires during the tense, intermissionless 90 minutes would be transgressing on Murray-Smith’s fun, fun heightened by Andrew Gmoser’s lighting and absolutely maximized by Dan Foster’s on-the-money direction.
What can be said—what probably needs to be said—is that viewers familiar with Highsmith’s writings are cinch audiences for Switzerland, where there isn’t a neutral syllable in the entire rigmarole. They’ll be familiar with Tom Ripley’s mental make-up as well as they’ll be up on what’s gotten Bruno Antony’s goat in Strangers on a Train. Fans who’ve researched Highsmith’s psychology will be aware that she (as an avowed lesbian, with men in her romantic past) and Tom Ripley (as undoubtedly a latent homosexual) have much in common.
Whether attendees for whom Highsmith is an as-yet-unacquired taste, the glorious dark humor of Switzerland may be somewhat obscure. But darkly humorous the Hudson Stage Company import is, and, as such, is a great time-killer, “killer” being the operative word.
Switzerland opened February 14, 2019, at 59E59 and runs through March 3. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
