Brandes is better at conveying sinister undertones. Cashman, as the stonewalling principal, suggests menace but lacks the outsize, almost caricaturesque dimensions often required of noir’s supporting players. Miller conveys an agitated fragility, though her fevered stress and eventual rage take a while to build in a show that runs barely an hour. But when all avenues prove fruitless, she turns to a writer friend (Walter Brandes) as the question of her sanity looms ever larger.Īs Blanche, Ms. Suspected of being a delusional hysteric, Blanche is referred to a sympathetic psychologist (Ken Simon, the show’s producer, playwright and, with Patrice Miller, co-director). The play - based on Evelyn Piper’s 1957 pulp mystery (the source for Otto Preminger’s 1965 screen adaptation) - derives tension from its resonant, inescapable subtext.īlanche Lake (Victoria Anne Miller) arrives at a New York school to pick up her daughter, only to be informed by teachers (Olivia Baseman and Vanessa FitzGerald) and a principal (Josephine Cashman) that the child was never enrolled there. This stage noir, about a single mother’s desperate search for her 3-year-old daughter after she disappears from nursery school, speaks to parental anxiety in an age when child abuse seems rife. Prime pulp - pure pleasure.There’s something perhaps inadvertently timely about “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” now at the Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
"A classic thriller - a riveting revisit to the dark side of the fifties, where the tension beneath the calm surface has an undertow that drags the reader into its grip. Blanche emerges as a new kind of heroine - a hard-boiled mom with gun in hand, willing to take any risk to find her missing daughter. In this fraught and at times freakish tale of suspense, Evelyn Piper takes us deep into the psyche of the 1950s to explore American fetishes, fallacies, and fears around motherhood and sexuality. Neither teachers nor students recall the small girl, and soon Blanche is engaged in a frantic search for any trace of her missing daughter.
But her expectant waiting becomes a mother's most dreaded nightmare: Bunny never materializes.
It's the first day of school when this story begins, and Blanche is eager to see how her daughter, Bunny, has fared away from home.
She lives alone, has a job, and has never been married. The classic novel of suspense is a headlong story of nerve-wracking tension. Blanche Lake is not like the other mothers who come to collect their children at the local nursery school on New York's Upper East Side. Read Bunny Lake Is Missing by Evelyn Piper available from Rakuten Kobo. The classic novel of suspense is "a headlong story of nerve-wracking tension, psychological validity and emotional drive" ( Oakland Tribune).
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