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Hitchcock Blonde by Terry Johnson, currently playing at the Jungle Theater, isn't what you would call a critical darling. I didn't read any of the other reviews before I went to see it, but I read them afterward, and they have the same complaints I did. The script is sprawling and overlong, in part because Johnson is obviously a playwright who has fallen madly in love with his own dialogue. Lines that could be short and sharp are long and blunted as a result. He tends to let his characters go and on, their words becoming increasingly purple as they speak, until finally they slip into a ceaseless torrent of useless orchidaciousness, as I have just done. He seems to give his audience no credit for intelligence, as when a character holds a movie tin filled with dust, and another character opines that she does not believe that to be just rotted film stock. Anybody who has been paying attention knows exactly what she thinks it is, but Johnson goes ahead and has her say it anyway, and then belabor the point.

As the play's title suggests, the subject is Hitchcock, and Johnson gives us two plays for the price of one. The first tells of a middle-aged college professor and Hitchcock scholar who has discovered what he believes to be a lost Hitchcock film. He uses this as an opportunity invite one of his students to his Greek villa to assist in the restoration process, but has designs on her that are far from academic. Additionally, Johnson tells a fictional tale of Hitchcock himself, who, in the play, is in the process of making Psycho. Johnson's Hitchcock has developed an interest in a body double from the notorious shower scene, and his designs on her are far from professional, but she has an agenda of her own that involves an abusive husband and a stolen knife. When I say we get two plays for the price of one, I mean that quite literally: Each of these stories could run as their own play and still fill an hour and a half apiece.

Let me go back and revise a sentence. The subject is not Hichcock. The subject is Hitchcock's interest in blonde leading ladies, and, more than that, his reportedly predatory and voyeuristic relationship with them. And here Johnson is in way over his head. The script replicates Hitchcock's reported misogyny but offers no real critique of it. Whatever bad endings Hitchcock planned for his blondes, he often put women onscreen who were at least as strong and as interesting as the male characters. Right up until her ghastly demise at the Bates Motel, Hitchcock treats Marion Crane as a sympathetic and rather gutsy character. But Johnson isn't as sharp in his writing. His females are as loquacious as the remainder of the cast, but tend to act like flibbertigibbets. The young student, as an example, spends much of the play sharply reprimanding the professor for his romantic aspirations toward her, but when she finally succumbs, she suddenly becomes a nymphomaniac, and desperately in love with the same man who repelled her earlier. And the abused wife -- well, Johnson makes an extraordinary lapse in judgement in allowing her tale to become something of a knockabout physical comedy. As black as Hitchock's sense of humor may have been, he recognized that violence was a grotesque act; in fact, he arguably lost some of his critical popularity in his later films, such as Frenzy, in which murder was shown to be an appalling and protracted spectacle.

But there are other pleasures to be had in the theater, even when a script isn't all it might be, and the Jungle Theater is especially good at providing those pleasures. They smartly have Joel Sass at the helm of this play, and Joel Sass knows how to direct a play, which is a rare skill. There is an abundance of people in this town who can move actors about on the stage and tell them to cheat out slightly to the audience when delivering dialogue, but there are very few people who can assemble all the various elements of a play so that it feels like a all the bits are supposed to fit together; Sass can. I know whereof I speak, by the way: I once played the gardener in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and the cast couldn't come to a consensus on how the play was supposed to be acted. Some of us thought it was a balmy period piece, and overacted accordingly, while others thought it was a drab contemporary affair, and underacted accordingly. The director was no help in this regard, being obsessed, instead, with where people stood on the stage, and so we wound up with a production in which half of the cast was doing one play and the other was doing another.

Sass knows where to put people on the stage, but also how to make the resulting play unified. And that's particularly important in Hitchcock Blonde, as it is a play with some notoriously difficult technical elements. For one thing, as the scholar and his student piece through the remains of the lost Hitchcock play, the frames are projected onto the stage. This could be gimmicky or distracting, and, further, the frames must look like Hitchcock might have lensed them, and Sass manages the difficult task of making these scenes feel inevitable. Of course the images are appearing onstage; how else to tell the story? And they do rather resemble Hitchock, or, at least, resemble a very old movie made in the 20s, with a striking blonde woman (played by Antonette Trussoni) in environments that, due to their noirish lighting, seem somehow menacing. There are a lot of little technical tricks to this play: a sequence, shot by Hitchcock, is projected as he is filming it; at another point in the play, a character appears naked in a shower, and this is represented by projecting a hologram of the woman onto pouring water. Sass not only succeeds at the technical aspects of these stage effects, but they work within the storytelling of the play, as extensions of the story being told, and this is a play where there is a real risk of such scenes coming off as stunts.

Further, Sass is good with actors, and The Jungle has always had its pick of some of the Cities' best. I have a mild criticism of both the female actresses, and I will voice them here, but let me begin by saying both bring much more to their roles than the script requires. The young student is played by Heidi Bakke, and she infuses her character with a jumpy, neurotic energy coupled with an unfeigned sensuality. She has short blond hair in the play, and I think she is supposed to be a Janet Leigh type, but she's a tougher and edgier character than Leigh was. Her professor is supposed to have been drawn to her because she is a Hitchcock type, but Bakke has found something else in the script -- hints of a troubled past and a tendency toward casual criminality -- that she plays up. While Leigh was nervous and skittish, Bakke is tough-talking and slightly dangerous. It's such an interesting performing choice that, in the second half of the play, when she goes boy crazy, it's a disappointment.

The abused wife in the Hitchcock narrative, in the meanwhile, is played by Mikki Daniels, and she has a much harder job, because she is given less to explore. Johnson gives her a lot of dialogue, but much of it feels crass and exploitative, such as a long monologue about her experiences being naked while filming the shower scene. There isn't much to her character beyond the fact that her husband beats her and she's supposed to be smart -- or so she tells us -- and it's not enough. Further, while both Bakke and Daniels' characters must take off their clothes during the play (the men, in the meanwhile, get to remain dressed in another example of how the play replicates cinematic misogyny without offering any real criticism), Daniels' onstage nudity is extended and intentionally voyeuristic. So she has a role that is both shallow and demanding. She affects a sort of high-strung smart alecky demeanor, and she delivers her dialogue as though she just can't stop herself from talking. She often looks terrified, and she has reason to be: not just because her husband sometimes uses her as a punching bag, but because everyone around her wants to use her, and get her clothes off, and give her very little back, including the playwright. Like Bakke, she's better than the role requires.

So my complaint about the actresses is going to sound trifling, and it is, but both affect accents that I found distracting. Bakke had to have an accent, as her character is English, but she speaks with an occasionally incomprehensible working class accent that I took to be Cockney. I don't recall if her character was supposed to be a Cockney or not, but the accent found within earshot of the Bow Bells in London is one of the hardest to imitate that's been produced by the British Isles, and she sometimes trips over it. The English only do regional or working class accents onstage when they must, in part because such accents were used as comic affectations for many years (Cockneys, in particular, were popular figures of fun in the Music Hall), and so even had Bakke mastered the accent, it still might have proven distracting.

Daniels also has an accent, a brassy East Coast one, perhaps from Jersey or the Burroughs of New York. In her instance, the accent sounds stagey, as though she weren't playing a character but a type -- the smartass blonde from 30s screwball comedies that pops their gum and snarls at men. As with Bakke, I found the accent distracting, although other audience member may not be bothered, or care.

There are two men in the play as well, and they deserve mention. Tom Sherohman plays Hitchcock, and he has the director's distinct physicality down. I'm not referring to the filmmakers awesome girth, although Sherohman plays that up, jutting himself out into a crescent shape, but also Hitchock's protruding lower lip and boyishly -- and devilishly -- darting eyes. He speaks in Hitchcock's drawled deadpan, and his performance is great fun. J.C. Cutler, in the meanwhile, plays the academic scholar with a yen for his students, and he's irritable and defensive for much of the play, but, like many academics, has a tendency to simultaneously be condescending and clueless. Cutler is saddled with Johnson's most irritatingly florid dialogue, and the actor does a neat trick with it -- he allows it to be irritating and pompous, and makes it part of his character. He's a very difficult man, but he has a real passion for Hitchock, and in the scenes in which he and his student peer at old frames of film and excitedly discuss the movies they love, he is enormously likable. For those moments, the play is as well, and then Cutler, and the play, get back to being both cocky and unexpectedly thick.

Hitchcock Blonde plays through March 8 at the Jungle Theater; 612.822.7063