Wait Until Dark - The Public Theatre

2015-16 Season
A Study Guide by Martin Andrucki
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Study Guide #1
Wait Until Dark - Study Guide - Page 1
Wait until Dark
By Frederick Knott
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
PRODUCED BY THE PUBLIC THEATRE
October, 2015
A Study Guide by Martin Andrucki
Dana Professor of Theater,Bates College
THE AUTHORS. The New York Times obituary for Frederick Knott, who died in 2002 at the age of 86,
describes him as “a notoriously unprolific playwright,” who, after a long lifetime, was known for only three
plays: two big hits, and one moderate success. The big hits were Dial M for Murder (1952), and Wait until
Dark (1966). The former received 552 performances on Broadway, the latter ran for eleven months in
New York and two years in London. Both were turned into Hollywood films. Dial M for Murder was
directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starred Grace Kelly; Wait until Dark starred Audrey Hepburn and Alan
Arkin.
The moderate success was Write Me a Murder, which ran for 196 performances on Broadway, between
October 1961 and April, 1962. Unlike his other two plays, this one did not find its way to the silver screen.
As The Times tells us, the playwright was born in China in 1916, the son of Quaker missionaries. He was
educated in England, graduating from Cambridge University in 1938. Between 1939 and 1946—from the
outbreak of the Second World War until its end—he served in the Royal Artillery, attaining the rank of
major.
Following the war, he set to work as a playwright, finishing Dial M for Murder in 18 months. However, it
would be years before that script was produced, appearing first as a television drama in 1952. From there
it moved to the West End in London, and then to New York, and finally to Hollywood. It has since become
a staple of regional and community theaters throughout the world.
Nine years later, Write Me a Murder appeared, and five years after that, Wait until Dark. Between 1966
and his death in 2002, Frederick Knott produced no additional plays.
In 2003, The Guardian, a British newspaper, quoted him as saying, “I was always intrigued with the idea
that somebody would plan a crime, and then you see that everything doesn’t turn out right. You can plan
a murder in great detail and then put the plan into action and invariably something goes wrong and then
you have to improvise, and in the improvisation you trip up and make a very big mistake.” This describes
the structure of each of his plays, including Wait until Dark.
Jeffrey Hatcher revised Knott’s play in 2013, moving the time of the action from 1966 to 1944, and
changing the contents of the doll being sought by a band of con men from heroin to diamonds.
By setting the play in October, 1944—four months after D-Day, two months before the Battle of the Bulge,
and six months before the final defeat of the Nazis—Hatcher creates a cast of male characters whose lives
have in important ways been shaped by the war. One is a draft-dodger, one has suffered psychological
trauma, and one, having served honorably, has now turned to crime.
The wartime setting also invites us to see the character of Susan through the lens of Rosie the Riveter,
that archetype of World War II womanhood: strong and independent, confronting problems on her own,
and succeeding in the absence of a husband.
Jeffrey Hatcher grew up in Steubenville, Ohio and attended Denison University.
©Martin Andrucki / The Public Theatre - 31 Maple St, Lewiston, ME - www.thepublictheatre.org
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Originally intending to pursue a career in acting, Hatcher eventually decided to seek fulfillment as an
author—a goal he has pursued with impressive energy. The Playwrights Data Base lists more than forty
plays written by him since 1987—an output larger than Shakespeare’s.
Many of those works are stage adaptations: of fiction, of non-fiction, or of other plays. Notably, he has
created theatrical versions of Henry James’s ghost story, “The Turn of the Screw,” of Mitch Albom’s
personal memoir of his conversations with a dying mentor, Tuesdays with Morrie, and of R.L. Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, produced by the Public Theatre in 2009.
In an interview for the American Theatre Wing, Hatcher explained that he is attracted to the process of
adaptation because it provides an opportunity to “re-energize” himself by working with plots and
characters created by someone else. “Sometimes,” he noted, “when you’re writing a lot of your own
material you can go to the well . . . once too often.” Adaptation, in other words, allows him to dip into
another imaginative “well” while his own is being replenished, allowing him to store up the creative juices
until the next time “you do one of your own original pieces.”
THE SETTING. The physical location of the action is a basement apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich
Village, New York. The stage directions tell us that the “general appearance of the room is
masculine/practical but there are the occasional dollops of New York bohemia,” including “drawings
(nudes, abstracts), framed photographs, lots of books. . . . A military raincoat and cap. A cane.” The
military attire belongs to the man of the house, Sam Hendrix; the cane to his blind wife, Susan.
Also belonging to Sam is an array of photographic equipment: “developing pans, bottles of chemicals,
etc.,” which sit on a work bench that takes up a major portion of the space in this cramped apartment. It
all belongs to Sam, who was a photographer for the Marine Corps during the war, and is now a professional
photographer in civilian life.
This, then, is essentially Sam’s room, the place where he practices his profession. His photographs hang
on its walls; it is decorated with his prints and filled with his books. It expresses his “masculine/practical”
identity. Though Susan has been married to Sam for more than a year, she is still a kind of stranger to his
world. So we are struck from the outset by Susan’s attempts to find her way around an alien space—one
which, in the end, she learns to dominate and control.
THE PLOT. The action of the play revolves around an elaborate attempt by a trio of con men to recover a
doll that they believe has come into the possession of Sam Hendrix. The doll, we ultimately discover,
contains a fortune in diamonds—a treasure that at least one of the con men is perfectly willing to kill for.
When Sam is lured away from the apartment, Susan, his blind wife, is left alone to cope with the
conspirators.
Gil Benbrook in his “talkinbroadway” blog does a good job of summarizing the plot:
Susan's husband Sam innocently brought the doll into their house after a woman he sat next to on
a train put it in his satchel for safe keeping. The woman later came to their apartment to pick it up,
only to be told that it had gone missing. Sam and Susan have no idea that the doll is filled with
something of extreme value; that the woman who came to pick up the doll has been murdered;
and that con artists, including a sociopathic killer, are planning to do whatever necessary to get
the doll from them. And all of that happens before the play actually begins. Disguising themselves
as various seemingly harmless characters, the men work their way into Susan's apartment, while
continually searching for the doll, literally right in front of her. Knott deftly uses Susan's blindness
as a perfect theatrical conceit to raise the chills several notches, since the audience sees the
©Martin Andrucki / The Public Theatre - 31 Maple St, Lewiston, ME - www.thepublictheatre.org
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deceitful and horrific events unfolding before Susan that she cannot. Hatcher's adaptation has
eliminated a few holes in Knott's original plot, and by setting it in the 1940s has added the elements
of film noir and the impact of World War II into the mix, both added bonuses.
Additional important plot elements include the conflict and ultimate cooperation between Susan and her
bratty, 14-year-old upstairs neighbor, Gloria; the attempt by the con-men to convince Susan that her
husband murdered the woman who came looking for the doll; and the slow build toward powerful
moments of recognition and reversal.
Aristotle tells us that these are the indispensable features of a complex plot, one that holds viewers’
attention by the creation of dramatic surprise. “Recognition” occurs when a major character passes from
ignorance to knowledge about another person or situation, or even about himself. The protagonist may
discover that the character she trusted is actually an enemy, or that the gun he thought was loaded is in
fact filled with blanks. Probably the greatest recognition in the canon of western drama is Oedipus’s
discovery that his wife is his mother, and that he himself is the man who murdered his father. Flowing
from such recognitions come “reversals”—180-degree changes in the protagonist’s condition or state of
mind. Oedipus, for example, changes in an instant from a king delighting in his power and good fortune
to a man plunged into misery and shame.
Much of the second act of Wait until Dark consists of a steady process of recognition, during which Susan
discovers that she is being manipulated by con-men. She passes from ignorance to knowledge,
discovering that Mike, a supposed war-buddy of her husband, is in fact one of the conspirators. Bit by bit
the evidence accumulates, until Susan, the blind victim of her antagonists, ironically comes to “see” what’s
really going on around her.
This then leads to a series of reversals in which Susan turns the tables on her most dangerous adversary,
the psychopathic killer, Roat. But this process itself contains a series of reversals with Roat and Susan
repeatedly switching positions, now one holding the upper hand, now the other.
There is also a major scenic reversal which occurs when Susan engineers a total blackout of the apartment,
thus giving her the advantage over her sighted opponent, who, unlike her, has not learned to function
successfully in the dark. But this situation is itself reversed when Roat opens the door of the refrigerator,
whose light restores his advantage over Susan. This continual see-sawing back and forth between
adversaries provides the mounting dramatic energy of the play’s final scene.
THE CHARACTERS. Susan Hendrix, a woman in her twenties, lost her sight in an automobile accident a
year and a half before the action of the play begins. Which means that she is still learning to be blind. Her
husband, Sam, is a demanding taskmaster in this project, insisting that she develop the skills necessary to
be self-reliant in her sightless world. “You can walk to my studio and back,” he tells her, “but no asking
for help.” To which Susan responds, “Why do I have to be the world’s champion blind woman?”
Because she is still learning to adapt to her disability, the audience is led initially to see Susan as vulnerable,
someone who might easily fall victim to the predators we encounter in the play’s first scene. But, as her
character develops, we see her growing more self-confident, capable in the end of devising and executing
a plan that defeats her adversaries.
When Mike describes her as someone who “can’t see,” her response is, “Thank you for that. Most people
say ‘You’re blind.’ Like, this is what you are, not this is what you can’t do anymore.” So she resists the
idea of being totally defined by her lack of sight; she wants to be accepted as Susan who now can’t see
rather than as a person completely transformed by her loss.
However, she also worries that her marriage may be threatened by her handicap: “Sam thinks he made a
mistake. . . . but it’s one thing to save a hurt puppy on the side of the road, it’s another to live with it and
watch while it doesn’t get better.” This anxiety makes her susceptible to the con-men’s attempt to paint
Sam as a man who has been cheating on her with the woman who gave him the doll—a discarded lover
whom he has now murdered.
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Wait Until Dark - Study Guide - Page 4
So throughout the play, a group of criminals manipulate an insecure blind woman in order to recover a
doll containing a fortune in diamonds. Late in the second act, Gloria reveals that she stole the doll, and
returns it to Susan. Now in possession of this dangerous object, Susan could easily hand it over to the
criminals, and rid herself of danger. Instead, she refuses several times to give it to the murderous Roat,
instead she takes possession of his knife, drenches him with gasoline, and traps him in the dark. She even
mockingly offers him her cane when he complains that he can’t see anything. “You know. . you’re one
clever blind girl,” he tells her.
By offering him her cane she in effect declares they have switched positions, with him now the blind
victim. And by withholding the doll, she is attempting to assert her autonomy.
But again, the tables turn. Roat opens the refrigerator door, illuminates the room, and finds himself back
in control. In a panic, she agrees to give him the doll, but the psychopathic Roat now wants revenge. He
fails, because Susan doesn’t give up. Instead, she continues the struggle with her tormentor. Using a
kitchen knife that she has literally hidden up her sleeve, she stabs Roat several times. But he still pursues
her. As the battle continues, Roat gets the knife away from Susan. He raises it to stab her, but at that
moment she finally manages to pull the plug on the refrigerator, again cloaking the room in darkness.
What will we find when the light comes back on?
Sam, back from his wild-goose-chase, enters the apartment and sees the appalling tableau of Roat hanging
dead from the open refrigerator door, with Susan wedged between that door and the kitchen counter—
alive. He rushes to help her but she stops him. Her final speech, the last words of the play, brings her
dramatic journey to its conclusion: “No. . . I can do it myself. . . . See?”
Mike, Carlino, Roat. This trio of con-men comprises three very distinct characters.
The script describes Carlino as a “bearish man in a heavy overcoat.” He defines himself without speaking
a word during the first moments of the play by rifling the Hendrix’s refrigerator, helping himself to a chunk
of leftover meatloaf and stealing a twenty-dollar bill from the freezer compartment. According to the
proverb, actions speak louder than words, and what Carlino’s actions say is that he is a petty thief who
seeks instant gratification for his criminal instincts. A former policeman, he is the muscle of the group,
physically imposing and just bright enough to think on his feet when unexpected obstacles pop up during
the course of the con-job. However, his rather dim-witted failure to anticipate a double-cross on the part
of his pathologically violent confederate, Roat, results in his death.
Mike at one point in the play says that charm is virtually a professional requirement for a thief. He
embodies this proposition. Pretending to be a Marine lieutenant who served in Italy with Susan’s
husband, Sam, he charms his way into her trust. Indeed, he charms the audience as well, which, like
Susan, will uncritically accept his bogus claims, until, at the end of the first act, he reveals himself to us—
though not to Susan—as one of the conspirators. Near the end of the play he displays the essence of his
character in this exchange with Susan:
MIKE. Give . . . me the doll.
SUSAN. You’ll have to hurt me. More than you imagine. I don’t think you can do that.
MIKE. You don’t know me.
SUSAN: Some people you can know very quickly, under extreme circumstances. . . . You won’t be
able to do it. You might hit me once, but that’ll be too much for you.
MIKE. It won’t be too much for Roat. . . .
SUSAN: Anything he does to me, you’ll be doing too! You won’t be able to live with that.
In other words, Susan has intuited from her brief acquaintance with Mike that he is a man with a
conscience, someone incapable of the kind of vicious cruelty practiced by Roat. Confronted by the moral
impossibility of harming Susan, he decides to abandon the criminal scheme and just take off without the
doll. In his final speech, before his own murder, he says, “You know the funny thing? I actually was a
©Martin Andrucki / The Public Theatre - 31 Maple St, Lewiston, ME - www.thepublictheatre.org
Wait Until Dark - Study Guide - Page 5
lieutenant once.” So there is a kernel of truth buried within his deceit. It seems he has served honorably,
was in fact an officer, and, at some level, remains a gentleman.
The word “character” comes from a Greek term meaning “sharp stick,” an implement used to inscribe a
mark on the hide of a farm animal—a kind of ancient branding-iron. So “character” is originally a physical
mark that establishes a creature’s identity. Roat is marked by just such a physical sign: his club foot.
Part of the con involves Roat’s pretending to be both an old man and that man’s son. But Susan can hear
that both of these fake characters are the same person: they’re wearing the same shoes which squeak
identically. When Roat confronts Susan at the end of the play, he explains that squeak:
They’re orthopedic. Club foot. I wasn’t born with it. When I got my draft notice, I wore a work
boot two sizes too small for a week and a half. Day I go down for my physical, my foot’s bent
backwards almost. I get my 4F, but not for the club foot. ‘Mental exception.’
“4F” means physically unfit to serve. So Roat has caused his own physical deformity as a way of dodging
the draft, a dishonorable choice to have made during what has come to be known as “the Good War.”
The club foot, then, identifies him as a moral outsider. It’s the physical expression of his “mental
exception.” We see that exceptionalism in his creepy attachment to the switchblade knife he calls
“Geraldine,” in his gloating description of two murders he has committed, in the pleasure he takes in
tormenting Susan, and especially in his gruesome intention to burn her alive.
Gloria, the fourteen-year-old upstairs neighbor, begins the play as a bratty annoyance to Susan. She balks
at closing the door of the refrigerator she has opened, and in a fit of temper she dumps the contents of a
kitchen drawer on the floor. She lies to Susan about wearing glasses, and in general projects a mood of
adolescent fractiousness and resentment. But we learn that her home life is substantially responsible for
her emotional problems: her mother is both an alcoholic and a part-time prostitute. When clients arrive,
Gloria has to leave home. Her only refuge is Susan’s apartment, which, not surprisingly, she enters in a
bad mood.
But as she becomes Susan’s ally in unraveling the conspiracy, she changes, showing her resourcefulness
and intelligence. Eventually she even admits that she does wear glasses, a mark of her improved
relationship with Susan.
Susan tells Mike that she met her husband, Sam, when they were both patients in the hospital where she
was being treated for the injuries she sustained in the car crash:
He met me when he wasn’t very strong. I gave him a chance to be strong again, to be the guy he
used to be. . . . He went over to Italy to take pictures, but . . . the things he was taking pictures of
. . . he couldn’t look through the camera lens anymore, so he ended up in Ward 7, across the way
from me.
So the horrors of the war Sam was photographing brought about his emotional breakdown, which landed
him in the psychiatric ward. A blind woman and a psychologically damaged man found each other and
married. When we first encounter Sam, he is in fact being “strong”—on Susan’s behalf. He wants her to
learn to be self-reliant, to avoid falling into the trap of victimhood and dependency. Having had his own
period of weakness—and apparently having overcome it—he is determined that Susan will do the same.
THE THEMES. The title, Wait until Dark, sounds like a threat—a warning that something scary and
dangerous will happen when night falls. Something like, “Wait till your father gets home.” On the other
hand, for Susan, the arrival of darkness is the opposite of dangerous—the dark is her ally, the medium in
which she can out-maneuver her enemy. When Roat can see, she is vulnerable; when the dark arrives,
she is strong.
©Martin Andrucki / The Public Theatre - 31 Maple St, Lewiston, ME - www.thepublictheatre.org
Wait Until Dark - Study Guide - Page 6
A marriage between a blind woman and a photographer invites us to consider the various meanings—
literal and figurative—of the verb “to see.”
Sam captures the visible world in his photographs, but he is blind to the fact that the con-men are
manipulating him throughout the play. By contrast, Susan, who can’t literally see, is the one who
figuratively sees-through the con. She is in the dark figuratively until she is in the dark literally.
As audience members, we know more than the characters on stage: we view the unfolding of the con, and
we watch Susan setting up the trap of darkness. This is called “dramatic irony”—the contradiction
between what the audience knows and what the characters believe. We see and they don’t. But this
know-it-all confidence gets upended at the conclusion of the first act, when we experience our own
recognition and reversal as Mike turns into one of the bad guys. We didn’t see that one coming.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
1. Why doesn’t Susan just give Roat the doll?
2. Why does Gloria deny that she is wearing glasses?
3. Why does Mike leave without the doll?
4. Why did the adapter change the contents of the doll from heroin to diamonds?
5. Why did the adapter change the historical period of the play from the 1960s to 1944?
6. Why does the playwright make Sam a photographer?
7. What is the meaning of the title of the play? To whom is it addressed?
8. Why does Gloria steal the doll?
9. Why does Susan think that Sam might be cheating on her?
10. What is the major difference between Mike and Roat?
©Martin Andrucki / The Public Theatre - 31 Maple St, Lewiston, ME - www.thepublictheatre.org