The Nasty Attic Players
Alfred Hitchcock’s
‘Lifeboat’
“A Delicious Dilemma.”
Starring the all at sea cast
Jose Antonio & Ellen Contente
Jack Cruz & Bill Doonan
Roy Harry & Jayson Kerr
Ellen Schmall & Stacy Israel
Directed by Andrew Dark
Having made our way through the early stages of cleaning and repairing the place to put on shows. For a fund-raiser I chose Hitchcock’s 1944 film ‘Lifeboat.’ Which I was particularly fond of for a fabulous performance by Tallulah Bankhead in the lead as Constance Porter. A wise cracking society magazine journalist. It had been adapted from the John Steinbeck novel and had an ensemble of characters who played out this tense World war two drama set in a boat at sea. The backdrop for the performance was a bunch of crazed flats I found upstairs at Elmwood playhouse. So, we had a show but…no seats. No matter where I tried to borrow some, there were none to be found. Then, in an act of great generosity, one of my actors at no small expense rented out all the chairs for this fundraiser. Such were the blessings I was to find along the way as we created the Black Cat theatre.
Words from the Attic
(Programme notes)
Lifeboat is a claustrophobic story set during the Second World War. The tense and ominous action all takes place in a single tiny boat, adrift in the North Atlantic. The boat holds eight survivors of a Nazi torpedo attack: a female sophisticated magazine writer/photographer, a socially minded seaman, a nurse, a mild mannered Latin steward, a seriously wounded Brooklyn stoker, an insufferable-capitalist, and a half-mad woman passenger who carries the body of her dead baby. This adroitly calculated cross-section of humanity is set to boil as after a day or so of floating aimlessly about, the castaways pick up another passenger who is the survivor from the German U-boat which sank them and the tension mounts to its frenzied climax. Please come down and support this newest community theatre in town. Can’t you hear the Cat calling?
There were no recordings of our performance. So I leave you this excellent recording made by Hitchcock himself.