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. Evelyn Piper was thepseudonym of Merriam Modell (1908-1994). Directed by Otto Preminger and starring Carol Lynley and Laurence Olivier (with music by the Zombies), the film reexamines motherhood and sexuality with a new plot twist that pins the problems on men. 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). No wonder the film version of Bunny Lake Is Missing was reset in swinging 1960s London. 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. There’s something perhaps inadvertently timely about “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” now at the Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
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