Art by Nathaniel Schardin
Switzerland - Artwork
Patricia Highsmith found new audiences with the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley. In a twist of fate Highsmith might have appreciated, she didn’t live long enough to enjoy the acclaim. Director Anthony Minghella’s adaptation reintroduced Tom Ripley, a character from several art house films and the antihero of a series of novels written by Highsmith from the ‘50s through the ‘90s. Ripley is a talented mimic who clings with deadly tenacity to the high life he discovered. Perhaps he’s a sociopath? Maybe a young man with a wobbly moral compass who got himself into a tight jam? He’s a killer when threatened but somehow, through the power of Highsmith’s characterization, we find ourselves rooting for him as he escapes the consequences.
Highsmith wrote short stories, novels and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. She never penned a stage play, but if she’d turned to theater late in life, the results might have resembled Switzerland, Renaissance Theatreworks’ season opener.
The play’s director, Laura Gordon, is no stranger to Renaissance Theatreworks or Milwaukee theatergoers. She was in the cast of Renaissance’s 2012 production of Honour, an emotionally complex earlier play by Switzerland’s author, Joanna Murray-Smith. Murray-Smith “captured Highsmith’s writing style in a way I admire,” Gordon says. “The playwright did a lot of research to find Highsmith’s voice, the sense of her complicated personal life.”
Highsmith was a struggling writer in 1940s New York. “She was a lesbian trying to succeed in a male-dominated industry,” Gordon says. “She had challenges and great love affairs. She was also a misanthrope and a racist. Her life was fascinating and odd. She bristled at being called a crime writer. She felt she was writing about human psychology.”
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Finding more respect for her writing in Europe than America, Highsmith became an expatriate in the ‘60s and settled for the final eight years of her life in Switzerland, building the bunker-like house that is the play’s setting. Gordon praises Lauren Nichols’ design for the one-room set, “Midcentury modern, very nice. I’d live there, it’s absolutely beautiful!” she says. “It has Highsmith’s desk and typewriter, her collection of books and record albums and a very large collection of weapons.”
Switzerland’s plot concerns a young man named Edward Ridgeway dispatched by a New York publisher to Highsmith’s abode with a mission: convince her to write one more Ripley novel. Renaissance’s artistic director, Suzan Fete, suggested Linda Reiter as Highsmith. “I saw her in Rose, the one-woman show about Rose Kennedy,” Gordon recalls, adding she had no doubt concerning Reiter’s ability to play the formidable, suffer no fools Highsmith. Gordon tapped Miles Blue as Ridgeway. She’d met him when he was an intern at Santa Cruz Shakespeare. “The actor playing Ridgeway—a complicated guy with a lot layers—has to seem ridiculously young but with the gravitas to go toe-to-toe with Highsmith.”
Descriptions of Switzerland have been kept vague, and Gordon is revealing no secrets. “The play has the bones of a thriller. It has suspense and surprises. I’m drawn to the psychology of it—it’s a reckoning Highsmith needs to have at the end of her life, facing her demons, facing who she is. She’s very funny, very smart, very witty. I think it’ll be an interesting and fun ride for the audience—and I hope people won’t give away the ending.”
Renaissance Theatreworks will perform Switzerland, October 19-November 9 at 255 W. Water St. For tickets, visit https://rtwmke.org/shows/switzerland/
