Just before The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis was set to open its production of The 39 Steps this January, an all too familiar wave of announcements began to roll out. The omicron variant of COVID-19 was causing an area-wide surge, and we were once again advised not to gather.
So, after spending the holiday season rehearsing, planning, and getting to know one another, everyone went home, including New York-based director Kate Bergstrom.
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“To have [The 39 Steps] play to a small audience, and an audience who wouldn’t feel safe, would just be devastating,” says Bergstrom. “And no one wanted that… We all went away for four or five weeks, back to our homes, and we took stock and were with our beloveds. And all the while, the cast and I felt really bonded. We kept in close touch and even had a reading of the play again, just to go, ‘We’re keeping this in our hearts and our brains. This is going to happen.’”
Beginning March 25, it is happening. The Rep will close its season with Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of The 39 Steps, a comedic thriller that tosses an everyday Englishman into a world of spies and espionage. Ryan Colbert, Olivia Gilliatt, Jimmy Kieffer, and Futaba Shioda take on the monumental task of bringing the play’s more than 150 characters to life.
“I think what’s exciting is, again, in this return of the theater after all this precarity, the protagonist of the play finds how delighted and relieved he is to find himself in the presence of others,” says Bergstrom. “It’s so relatable, and I think I was like, ‘Wow, this is more than I could have ever even realized… It’s Monty Python meets Key and Peele meets Hitchcock noir. And then there’s always a beating heart underneath all of that.”
The classic story will be tailored to the local stage, with inspiration for the design coming from East St. Louis’ historic Majestic Theater. An iconic red curtain and ghost light will pay homage to the shuttered movie house, while the thrust stage at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts will lend a unique angle to The Rep’s rendition of the play.
“The audience is surrounding these actors, these performers. They are imbued within the design and the imagination of the space and the action, which I think is unique to this production,” says Bergstrom. In addition to the aesthetic choices that will set The Rep’s production apart, Bergstrom says they also hope to add some dimension and unique elements to the trope-infused relationships between Colbert’s Richard Hannay and the three female characters portrayed by Gilliatt.
“The goal with our production is to invigorate and question, as Hitchcock was in his telling, the idea of partnership and marriage, the idea of working together. And so the role of female track, I think, has a more robust intersection with the changing and growing of Hannay,” says Bergstrom. “They both have a little bit more of a reckoning of: when you come together, together becomes what you are working for. So that’s unique, hopefully, to our production. And the innovation of the staging was devised with the actors, so this staging is unlike anything you will have seen. It’s very much of and by and for this company.”
The 39 Steps opens March 25 at 8 p.m. and runs through April 10. Tickets start at $25 and can be purchased at repstl.org.
