Overnight. Theater.

Adaptation Of `Little Sister' Looks Good, But Sells Chandler Short

October 07, 1993|By Sid Smith, Tribune Arts Critic.

In Raymond Chandler's "The Little Sister," C-notes, as in $100 bills, are tossed about like quarters; women use sex as the deadliest of weapons; and California, that love-hate paradise of the noir novelist's imagination, is a "department store state," trading in "the best of nothing and the worst of everything."

Lesser known than "Murder, My Sweet," "The Lady in the Lake" or "The Big Sleep," "Sister" is nevertheless drenched in Chandler grit and manly wit, a serpent's slide through paths strewn with blackmail, gangsters, reefer joints, starlets gone bad, lust as overheated as Sunset Boulevard asphalt on a muggy day, and grisly murders enacted with an ice pick.

Mark Richard's adaptation for Lifeline Theatre is thick in plotting and stinging in humor. But in trying to do film noir one better, in borrowing "City of Angels" camp, Richard offers up something that aspires to more than melodrama and ends in something considerably less. All the wry, campy lines undercut the dark doings that make the California school and founder Chandler so compelling.

Conversely, Meryl Friedman's production has all the feel and look of the period but little of the muscle. The women, wonderfully clothed by Margaret Morettini, do best, a trio of sultry, sexy, alluringly kittenish femme fatales: Catherine O'Connor, a fidgety temptress; Laurie Dawn, a smoky blond starlet; and Suzanne Friedline, indescribably pretty and deadly in black.

But Chandler's about testosterone, while these actors are flaccid and too refined, the support players barely surviving potentially terrific miniatures.

Richard's choice to split Marlowe in half, providing both a character in action (Frank Nall) and a narrator (Ed Shimp), doesn't help, especially since both performers are too polished, bleached and pontifical. They're dandies cast as a man's man.

The physical look is a joy: Peter Gottlieb's lighting and Alan Donahue's imposing trapezoid (for Hollywood slide projections and hazy views of the women as satiny crooners) all make for a moody Technicolor variation on a supposedly black-and-white era.


"The Little Sister" is playing through Nov. 14 at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave., Chicago. Phone 312-761-4477.