Taking the next step

There are more than 150 characters in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and Sheffield Chastain can play almost all of them.

For all its characters, the play, which takes up residency at Warner Theatre in Washington from March 23 to 28, features a mere four actors. Chastain is the show's primary male understudy; as a result, he's always ready to play either the lead male or myriad other parts in the show at a moment's notice.

And with all these characters comes a host of necessary accents and dialects, which, according to Chastain, include Scottish, British (with regional dialects such as Cockney), German and Russian. 

And that's just for the male roles. While the one female on the four-person cast handles all the "attractive" roles, Chastain has to apply those accents to a woman's tone when he plays one of the "not attractive women."

The show's female cast member has to switch between a "Russian spy, a Scottish housewife [and] a Hitchcock blonde," said Allison Jean White, the show's female understudy.

For White, who has loved toying with accents since she mimicked Disney villians as a 5-year-old, the constant switch isn't much of an issue; she was comfortable with the all dialects before she ever got the role.

All the quick character changes mean the play, a "classic Hitchcock innocent-man story," according to Chastain, has to operate at a frenetic pace, including split-second backstage costume changes. While the actors use velcro, layers and other tricks to switch clothes quickly, the process is still difficult.

"The hardest thing is quick changes," Chastain said. "We can rehearse everything else, but we can't practice quick changes.

"All the crew, all the cast are moving constantly for the whole two hours," he said, and added that watching the happenings backstage is probably an entertaining show in itself.

Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps tells the story of Richard Hannay, who one day decides to go to the theater. There, he meets a femme fatale-esque spy. When she gets murdered, Hannay is accused and goes on the run in an attempt to prove his innocence.

According to Chastain, the play synthesizes styles as diverse as the Hitchcock thriller, comedy, vaudeville and clown routines, though it's still predominately a comedy. The play also includes "sly, funny references to other Hitchcock movies," Chastain said.
And the story, including its mass of characters, is helped by only the slimmest of stage decorations: The set includes not much more than a box and a couple of tables.

Chastain sees the sparseness of the set as an advantage.

"By sort of rocking their bodies back and forth you get a sense of movement," Chastain said of a scene on a train. "The great thing about it is that each audience member has a different version of what the train looks like, how fast it is."

With the frantic pace of the show, continually changing the set would be that much more difficult. As it stands, Chastain believes leaving the set design up to the audience's imagination is a beneficial choice.

At any rate, it keeps both the actors — and their audience — on their feet.

"It's not like a Chekov play where you'll get lost in drama and complexity," White said. "It's more of a fun, entertaining story."

Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps will play at Warner Theatre in Washington from March 23 to March 28. Tickets range from $30 to $70.

jwolper@umdbk.com