Frightful fare Firehouse scares up Veronica’s Room BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Veronica’s Room By Ira Levin. Directed by Judy Meneely. With Jamie Lyn Sousa, Justin H. Brierley, Barbara Finelli, and Rick Bagley. At Firehouse Theater through October 31.

To stage a spooky play around Halloween is a noble public service, allowing us to exorcise our fears through exercising our apprehensions. Firehouse Theater is pitching in this month, giving us an enjoyably goose-bumpy production of Ira Levin’s Veronica’s Room.

Levin’s deliciously twisted imagination came up with Rosemary’s Baby, Deathtrap, and The Boys From Brazil, among his unsettling jottings. He may have a potboiler sensibility, but not only can Levin sustain a burbling simmer with the best of them, he also refuses to resort to supernatural contrivances. Unlike Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe, Levin eventually lands us back on solid ground, back in Kansas however long we’ve been whirling around in Dorothy’s distracting tornado. That makes Veronica’s Room a lot more satisfying by the end, a mystery to solve rather than just a roller coaster to survive.

It was a dark and stormy night. That’s not stated, but we get the idea. As the story opens, a Boston University sociology major named Susan (Jamie Lyn Sousa) is being convinced by a charming couple with Irish brogues to help out with an outlandish but seemingly harmless and beneficial trick on someone.

John (Rick Bagley) and Maureen (Barbara Finelli) have told her that they are the gardener and housekeeper, respectively, of this rambling old Victorian house. They have taken her to the bedroom — all its furniture covered with sheets — of the late Veronica, of whom Susan is the spitting image. A jigsaw puzzle is on a table, left unfinished as Veronica, who was obsessive about them, did many years ago. Susan is shown a photograph that proves the uncanny likeness and implored to masquerade as the young woman, who died back in 1935, secluded with tuberculosis for seven years until her death. The idea is for Susan to pretend to be the friendly ghost of Veronica, "appearing" to her sister Sissy, who is down the hall dying of cancer. The delusional Sissy needs Veronica to forgive her for some imagined offense long ago.

Obviously (although not so apparent to poor Susan) all is — and are — not what appears to be. This Irish couple, can they be as wholesome and innocent in intent as they appear to be? (Of course, we know they’re not, but is their secret intent reasonably harmless or fang-drippingly malevolent?) And what’s with Susan’s love Larry and his aversion to being touched?Is it a harmless neurosis, as he says, to melt away as he gets to know her better, or does he have fangs too?

The playwright was well aware of the automatic Don’t-go-in-there! reaction of slasher movie audiences, which prevents us from continuing to root for characters too stupid to not step into obvious danger, characters we instinctively hope will be snatched up out of our gene pool. Yet we need to keep empathizing with Susan, so Levin gives her a reality check in the form of Larry (Justin H. Brierley), a new potential boyfriend. She is traveling alone, and she met him the same day that the amiable Irish couple stepped over to them in a restaurant, expressing amazement at her looking so much like Veronica.

Larry is a professional cyni — a lawyer — and suggests to Susan that the couple might want her to do more, such as wheedle out of Sissy where the family jewels are buried. Under Larry’s wary eye, Susan agrees to play dress-up, pinning her hair up to make it appear shorter, as Veronica’s was. She even tries to put on a New England accent, to better fool Sissy.

The acting in a melodrama such as this needs to be a notch above adequate, otherwise unwelcome attention is attracted to the artifice of it all. A convincing job is done by everyone here, with the exception of Brierley, trying too hard as the suspicious lawyer in the first act — although after intermission he settles down and doesn’t get in the way of his character. Finelli and Bagley provide just what we would expect from the solicitous loyal servants — motherly concern from the housekeeper and good-humored charm from the gardener. As for Sousa, she is just the breath of fresh air that this musty old mansion of a tale needs, making Susan/Veronica spunky enough to not be a pathetic potential victim but human enough to seem vulnerable.

Veronica’s Room is the October version of light summer fare, only it has us biting our fingernails instead of slapping our knees. Ira Levin came up with a suspenseful story that lifts itself a bit above the silly genre, and director Judy Meneely has done a good job getting it across to us.