Stalking the Bogeyman.New World Stages (see Off Broadway). Based on the article by David Holthouse. Adapted and directed by Markus Potter. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr 25mins. No intermission.
Stalking the Bogeyman: In brief
Roderick Hill and Erik Heger star in a stage version of David Holthouse's autobiographical account of plotting the murder of the man who had raped him as a child 25 years earlier, adapted and directed by Markus Potter.
Stalking the Bogeyman: Theater review by Raven Snook
Sometimes the medium changes everything. Journalist David Holthouse’s real-life saga of surviving childhood rape and his plan to exact violent revenge on his attacker, so compelling in print and on This American Life, loses much of its potency translated to stage. Structured in linear flashbacks connected by narration lifted from Holthouse’s original article, Stalking the Bogeyman tries to flesh out his harrowing tale. Adapter-director Markus Potter has added characters (including a cliché of a therapist) and dramatized Holthouse’s memories in well-acted if often awkward scenes. Save for a few powerful sequences (his mother’s searing phone call to the rapist’s parents; the uncomfortably quiet confrontation between the two now-grown men), the piece feels superficial and emotionally distant. As Holthouse, the intense Roderick Hill attempts to let us in, but it’s David Goldstein’s striking set, a floor-to-ceiling display of symbolic detritus, that best communicates his anguished, patched-together inner life.
THE BOTTOM LINE A remarkable true story rings false onstage.