Bell cells: Peter Frechette (left) and Darren Pettie

Leave it to Neal Bell. So many recent plays have made forays into the noir genre—conscious or unconscious, spoofing or surrealist—that I had assumed there was nothing new to be gotten from it. But Bell walks in, boldly and knowingly, where legions have trod before, and instantly finds new paths to explore, new matches of tone and subject, new sources of moral perturbation. His title, from forensic medicine, describes both the directions in which blood has spurted from a fatal wound and the aesthetic tactic his script employs. His topic, achingly visible under the sprayed droplets of his story, is responsibility; you might say that Spatter Pattern scrutinizes what Wallace Stevens implied, in "The Man With the Blue Guitar," was the central question of the modern age: "Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood,/And whichever it may be, is it mine?"

Or you might simply say it's about how paths cross: The first thing we see, in Michael Greif's taut, stark production, is four people walking past each other in two opposite directions, couples that aren't couples. Gradually stories emerge. A man named Dunn moves in next door to a man named Tate. Each lives alone; neither wants to be living there; each has a past with a recently dead person in it casting a huge shadow over his present. Dunn (Peter Frechette) is "done" in every sense: a washed-up gay screenwriter whose longtime lover, recently deceased (lung cancer, not AIDS), has left him with guilts, doubts, and writing blocks instead of affectionate memories; as the play opens, his longtime agent is giving him the heave-ho. Tate (Darren Pettie)—whose name suggests among other things the German word for "deed" (Tat)—is equally on his uppers: A Gulf War vet and college English professor suspected of murdering one of his students, he has been sacked by the school, left by his wife, and stalked by a detective convinced of his guilt. With his photo smeared all over the tabloids in a case they label "Throat-Slitting 101," he's even recognized when he patronizes a hooker (who, unimpressed, tells him she also did Bernhard Goetz).

Tate needs someone to unburden himself to, other than the silent callers who ring up at 3 a.m. to harass him (his response is to address them as if they were the dead student). Dunn needs both a companion and a subject other than his own grief to write about. (For a double bonus, he's erotically drawn to Tate, despite the latter's non-response, and his ex-agent has been trying to float a TV movie about the case.) The terse, swiftly intercut scenes in which we've seen the first part of each man's story begin to give way to scenes with creepily uncertain points of view. The murdered girl begins to haunt Dunn's vision as well as Tate's; Tate's self-dramatizing behavior increasingly suggests that he's already become the character envisioned in Dunn's burgeoning screenplay. The nerve-fraying mixture of bonding and mistrust between them starts to build, subtly, to a quiet and unexpected resolution.

To make matters even trickier, in scenes involving Dunn, Bell uses a get-me-rewrite device: People speak their unspoken thoughts, which then, at the ping of a little bell, are removed as they jump back a few lines. The maneuver is not merely a gimmick: Letting us hear what the characters think but don't say is utterly apposite to a play that scrutinizes the difference between things thought and things actually done, between what's said and what's believed. It's a good play to have around, just now, in a country that currently has serious trouble sorting out the difference between, for instance, what politicians assert and what their policies actually achieve. The extent to which we mean what we say, believe what we feel, are responsible for what we desire and what we do—these have been Bell's philosophic stock-in-trade since he first attracted notice, some decades back, with Two Small Bodies, another play about the eerie bond between criminal and chronicler. In Spatter Pattern he achieves that vibrant welding of concept and drama in which the theme permeates the action, rather than being illustrated by it. There are no handy moral tags in the dialogue to explain the play, and the more you unpack its events, the more troubling they become.

Greif calibrates his production exquisitely. I'm not often a fan of Mark Wendland's sets, with their industrial starkness and their showy reliance on machinery; his design here serves the action immaculately, its shifting walls drenched in shadows by Kevin Adams's sharp, evocative lighting. The sound design, by Jill B.C. DuBoff with music by Michael Friedman, both fixes and challenges moods, teasing you with hints of film noir scoring and never nudging its way into your attention ahead of the action. In a string of small roles, John Lavelle stirs up audience jitters with particular effectiveness as a haywire student; Deirdre O'Connell, running the gamut from frantic coed through seen-it-all hooker to sour-mouthed agent, is perfection in every role. Peter Frechette, expectably, embodies the grief-stricken writer with anguished, vulnerable grace. And Darren Pettie skillfully conveys not only the possible psychotic streak in Tate but—far more difficult—the weight of the moral burden he carries. As a bonus, Pettie's good looks—-at least in the halations of Adams's golden lights—live up to the handsomeness that's supposed to leave Dunn dumbstruck when he and Tate first meet.

© The Village Voice

In order to enjoy Neal Bell's Spatter Pattern (Or, How I Got Away With It), it's necessary to suspend disbelief over a major plot development. But Bell's sizzler of a play -- expertly presented by a theater team running smoothly on all cylinders -- will make you want to bend over backwards to forgive the credulity-stretching central coincidence.

What you have to take on faith is that Dunn (Peter Frechette) and Tate (Darren Pettie) would end up living in adjoining apartments in a tenement located in one of Manhattan's dingier neighborhoods. Dunn, a writer who's been having trouble turning out saleable scripts since his lover died, has moved into the cheerless edifice with its gray stucco walls because it's acceptable enough to him in his depressed state; Tate has taken his barren rooms because his marriage and his teaching career have foundered as a result of his being the prime suspect in a case involving a murdered student named Andrea Evans.

The big co-inky-dink here is that Dunn has been dropped by his agent, Selma, who's following the Tate headlines and would like to get a screenplay about him that she can peddle -- and there's ex-client Dunn, suddenly living right next door to the guy. So, while mired in grief for his late lover David, Dunn sets about befriending Tate and attempts to discover whether he was actually the person who knifed Andrea in a back alley. Though Tate is hip to Dunn's motives, he can't stop himself from confiding a good deal of information, eventually including a disturbing secret.

In telling his story, Bell comes up with all sorts of engrossing notions and incidents. Not the least of them is Dunn's inclination as a writer to imagine various versions of what he's experiencing. His flights of fancy, as often as not paranoid, are interrupted by a bell that jolts him back into the real world. The playwright also introduces a handful of additional characters -- all played by Deirdre O'Connor and John Lavelle -- including Tate's estranged wife, a hooker whome he visits, a detective who's convinced that Tate's the killer, and a student friend of Andrea's who's also certain of Tate's guilt. And then there's troubled, troublesome Andrea herself, who haunts Tate and even shows up to occupy Dunn's vivid imaginings.

Spatter Pattern -- the title a reference to blood at a crime scene -- is a did-he-do-it mystery, the outcome of which won't be blithely spattered here. It's also about life's existential mysteries. Dunn and Tate, often isolated in their meagerly furnished spaces, are men ambushed by circumstances of their own making. Dunn, who spends some of the action deciding what to do with David's "cremains," has boxed himself into memories; Tate has based an aspect of his past on a fabrication, and the lie is biting him on the ankle. The "got away" in Bell's subtitle is a double entendre: For all its chic noir aspects, Spatter Pattern is about a pair of emotional fugitives reckoning how to get away from themselves. Dunn and Tate eventually help each other to solutions, and their escapes at Bell's denouement make for indelible stage images.

Stage images, of course, are a collaborative effort. To help achieve them, Bell has director Michael Greif, who's working with great sympathy for and imagination about the text. In the play's first moments, he dispatches actors and stagehands across the stage as if they're so many faceless city dwellers heading to their jobs. Subsequently, the stagehands labor efficiently and often to push set designer Mark Wendland's gray walls into various concatenations. Now they're grim studios in which Dunn and Tate ruminate; now they're an interrogation room; now they're a prostitute's quarters; now, pushed back, they allow for an approximation of the Hudson River, where Dunn and Tate go to search for a discarded knife that Tate insists was not the murder weapon.

Sound designer Jill B. C. Duboff does a fine job of infusing the production with city noises, and she also has Michael Friedman's original music to play around with. Friedman, aware that he's enhancing a nervy script, has wrought nervy compositions; he even channels Bernard Herrmann-like strains to emphasis the Hitchcockian atmosphere. Lighting designer Kevin Adams has steeped the stage in deep shadows and sickly interior illumination. His last effect, accompanying Dunn's final liberating activity on a deserted beach, is indelible theater craft.

In carrying out that action, Peter Frechette as Dunn raises his impressive performance a quantum notch. Frechette apparently has a lock on the intelligent, metropolitan gay man; he plays him regularly and well, and Dunn is a worthy addition to his gallery. Darren Pettie walks the line required as a character who is or isn't guilty of a particular crime but nevertheless suffers guilt pangs over his life. John Lavelle is so good in his several roles that, every time he shows up, an observer thinks: "It must be the same actor, but it can't be." Deirdre O'Connor -- who has never committed a false step on stage -- makes Tate's wife an understandable harridan, agent Selma one of Manhattan's acerbic funny ladies, and Andrea a bundle of worries. As the prostitute, she takes the words "Oh, honey" and turns them into an autobiography. But it's Frechette, in luminous blue light in the drama's last moments, who seals Neal Bell's plaintive message about our continual struggle to "get away with it" and, even more urgently, to get away from it.

© TheaterMania.com

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