A hellish host and her enigmatic guest square off in a deadly game of cat and mouse: Theatre in the Park's SWITZERLAND

Lynda Clark, in Theatre in the Park's SWITZERLAND

Switzerland
4 stars (out of 5)
Theatre in the Park
Through Aug. 15
theatreinthepark.com

It’s hard to say which of the two was more improbable: the witty, charming and utterly psychopathic Tom Ripley, a character at the center of five unforgettable books, a brace of films and an upcoming series on Showtime, or his creator, novelist Patricia Highsmith.

By most accounts, Highsmith’s perpetually outré behavior in professional and social settings placed her in a category far, far beyond high-maintenance.

Director Lynda Clark (who also plays the writer in the current Theatre in the Park production) is just getting warmed up when she checks a series of dysfunctional boxes in her program notes. True: Highsmith was markedly misanthropic, abusive, histrionic, controlling and a hardcore alcoholic.

But add to those endearing traits xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism, and it’s small wonder that, after her death, her own publisher, Otto Penzler, termed Highsmith “the most unloving and unlovable person I’ve ever known.” He then concluded, “I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly.”

For all these failings, she remained a brilliant writer. History notes that Highsmith wrote the first published lesbian novel with a happy ending, The Price of Salt, under a pseudonym in 1952. Thirty-eight years later, it was republished under her own name, and later adapted into the 2015 Cate Blanchette film Carol.

For the most part, though, her novels were forbidding, existential examinations into the dark side of the psyche, which earned her comparisons in some circles with Albert Camus, and secured for her a chevalier, or knighthood, in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Ira David Wood IV & Lynda Clark, in SWITZERLAND

In her three-act thriller Switzerland, playwright Joanna Murray-Smith places this literary gorgon in the last chapter of her life, in self-imposed exile outside Locarno, Switzerland. On this morning, she has an unwelcome visitor: Edward, a young emissary from her American publishing house (played, with unassuming diffidence at first, by Ira David Wood IV).

As Edward tries to ingratiate himself, Highsmith goes, true to form, straight into hand-to-hand verbal combat, with no quarter given. "From the moment you walked through that door,” Clark all but brays as the author, “I could see that you brought the slap-dash of America with you.”

Edward protests when Highsmith brands all American young people as oversold – and self-deceived – on their own achievements. When he chides, “I don’t think I’m deluded,” she calmly replies, “That’s because you are deluded, genius!”

Gamely, Edward keeps trying to convince the author of his merits. “From the first time I read Strangers on a Train, I felt something,” he says. “I felt a connection!”

Clark serves up Highsmith’s response, with topspin to spare: “Funny, but I didn’t! Goodbye!”

Highsmith becomes more repellent as she grills Edward on the details of his parents’ deaths. “I love a car wreck,” she exults, “who was driving?” When informed it was an accident in winter, she all but gushes, “I do love an icy road! They’re lethal!”

But the power dynamics shift as Edward gradually reveals knowledge about Highsmith that’s a bit too close to the bone. The inveterate chain-smoker is now dying from lung cancer. Her last couple of books haven’t been great. Whatever legacy Highsmith is going to have could be altered by the one last novel that Edward and her publisher want her to write – for markedly different reasons, as it turns out.

A psychological war of cat and mouse ensues as Edward parcels out revealing little tidbits of information he really shouldn’t have. Meanwhile, a dangerously volatile Highsmith eyes her knife and gun collection, which Edward’s just added to with a gift from her publisher, with increasing interest and calculation.

Wood and Clark, in Theatre in the Park's SWITZERLAND

Those skirmishes take place before both characters cross lines they won’t be able to uncross.

Murray-Smith’s plot gradually ratchets up the suspense, although her armchair psychoanalysis remains too obvious to add much to these proceedings.

Gabriel Esparza’s uneven light design place Clark’s character in inappropriate shadows at times, before unsubtle lighting transitions needlessly underline heightened emotional moments. And although we’re not that far north, a projected digital rendering of the Alps on designer Nathaniel Conti’s set remains strangely illuminated at all hours, day and night.

Lynda Clark has long been a celebrated actor in the region; she certainly has the artistic and emotional bandwidth for this character’s challenges. I can’t help feeling, though, that if she hadn’t taken on distracting double duty here as actor and director, an artistic resource outside herself might have helped her craft a deeper, more finely detailed reading of her character, and further explore the nuances of Highsmith’s bizarre extremes.

Wood brings an expected professionalism to Edward’s character, playing the cards his character has held to his chest until the last act with relish.

Clark, Wood, and fight and intimacy choreographer Jeff A.R. Jones craft a memorable last moment, a true totentanz that unites this fated couple as they dance into the darkness.
 
In so doing, the director, performers and playwright bring a momentary, improbable – and, fittingly, somewhat grisly – grace to a life that so often lacked it.

What a way to go.