I like what Next Stage is trying to do as a theater company, though I can’t always figure out exactly what that is. Or why a play like “Frame 312” ever appealed to them.
It has a great premise: An ordinary woman has been hiding the original Zapruder film for 30 years and has decided it’s time to tell her two grown children she has the evidence that proves Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
It features two of the best actresses in town playing Lynette in the 1960s (Laura Norman) and in the 1990s (the great Susan d’Autremont).
But this is not a great play, not by a long stretch. We’re let in on the playwright’s conspiracy angle from the start – the feds felt it would be too disturbing for Americans to process a larger, unsolved conspiracy. So they confiscate the tape from Life Magazine and alter it (at frame 312) to make it look as if Oswald acted alone. But mag boss Mr. Graham (Jim Hunt), presciently suspecting the coming foul play, has only given the feds a copy. He’s entrusted the original to Lynette, a secretary no one would ever suspect of possessing the original.
That’s all well enough, but what follows is not an espionage tale of mystery or building suspense – it’s a mundane and uninvolving family spat that’s a muddled mess of structure, storytelling and motivations.
Seriously: Why does playwright Keith Reddin make Lynette so lovely and her kids so utterly insufferable? Guess what Terrible Tom does on his mom’s birthday: He demands a $75,000 loan (Happy birthday, Mom!). He’s married to an exaggerated sophisticate who steps right out of a Carol Burnett sketch. On-edge sister Stephanie is so OCD as to make those wacky sisters from “Proof” seem sane as day. And we never learn why.
So why would Lynette consider for a second entrusting these narcissists with 23 seconds of film that would change history? If these kids were even halfway normal, we could get down to some interesting business about the coverup – what it means and what must now be done. Instead, her brats aren’t remotely interested in seeing it. They’d rather sulk and pout and argue. It’s absurd.
Director Gene Kato doesn’t help with several questionable staging calls. The stories play out three decades apart on side-by-side sets that don’t match in style. One is a naturalistic backyard. The other is a conceptual depiction of a Life Magazine office. It’s dominated by a wall-sized watercolor of the Kennedy motorcade at the time of the shooting (frame 312?). If that’s a wall hanging, it’s the height of bad taste.
And there are moments in the first act when as Mr. Graham, the otherwise excellent Hunt, seems so ill you’re sure he should be in a hospital. Turns out it’s all a planned foreshadowing effect – but not a single character reacts even slightly as he’s hacking up a lung. Did no one in the 1960s ever say, “Bless you,” or “Is that blood I see?, or “Want us to call an ambulance, big guy?”
Most aggravating is the prominent positioning of a common household object that makes the ultimate fate of Lynette’s film obvious to everyone.
The shame of it all is that most of the acting is pretty good. As Terrible Tom and Psycho Stephanie, Josh Hartwell and particularly Jennifer Anne Forsyth do some thankless, precise work creating characters you won’t like.
So let’s see … a conspiracy tale with no suspense. Characters we dislike. Terrible ending. We learned nothing new. None of it fits. It’s like a film reel, with more than a few frames missing.
“Frame 312”
DRAMA | Presented by Next Stage|By Keith Reddin | Directed by Gene Kato | Starring Susan d’Autremont and Laura Norman | THROUGH APRIL 7 | At the Phoenix Theatre, 1124 Santa Fe Drive | 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays | 1 hour, 40 minutes | $18 | 720-209-4105 or nextstagedenver.com).
