Alley Theatre’s World Premiere of The Body Snatcher

For a spooky play that traffics in grave robbing, fog-enshrouded nights, serious anatomy lessons, and what ethical lengths a loving father – a famous surgeon in 1899 London – would go to save his beloved daughter from dying, The Body Snatcher, a world premiere from Katie Forgette (Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Jersey Lily, Alley 2023) needs more heart.

Like other doctors before him (Jekyll and Frankenstein come quickly to mind), Robert Noakes (a fiercely committed David Rainey) is ahead of his time as he plays God. He needs a fresh young heart to transplant into his daughter Elizabeth (dewy Alyssa Marek) to keep her from succumbing to his wife’s previous condition of “cardiac inefficiency.” She died young, too. As we’re in the Victorian age of the “resurrectionists,” that shouldn’t be much of a problem, just hire opportunistic Fettes (an unrecognizable Brandon Hearnsberger gleefully eating up the scenery) to snatch a body. What could go wrong?

Everything, really.

Awash in the Alley’s munificent production provided by Yu Shibagaki’s pungent set design replete with tomes, vials, anatomy charts; Pablo Santiago’s gang-bang lighting; a gothic sound design (beating hearts, frightened horse whinnies, thunder claps that would have lit up the heart of Hollywood’s master of horror, James Whale); and Asta Bennie Hostettter’s plummy Victorian costumes with their mutton sleeves, swishing muslin dresses, and mismatched plaids, none of this is enough to counter the sketchy rom-com romance between Noake’s daughter and Noake’s precocious assistant Dr. John Brook (Luis Quintero, sporting the most faux mutton chops that immediately stop any romantic notions from the start.) The quick romance never ignites. 

And what are we to make of obsessed Dr. Noakes? This seemingly most ethical of physicians, a paragon of science, beloved by his students, will do anything to get that heart. His standards are lower than Fettes’. Where are his principles? Is this love for his daughter or love for the historic recognition he will garner from a successful operation? When he is willing to operate on his daughter while still alive, even in his misguided belief that he can save her, we tune out and lose our sympathy. He becomes his own Fettes.

Act II dips into melodrama as if in a Victorian romance, culminating with Noakes entering the operating theater and addressing his students, preparing to begin a dissection. A shrouded body lies on the table. A veiled female figure sits in the background. Which woman is where?

Although set ten years after the terror reign of Jack the Ripper in 1888, perhaps that thread could have be woven into Forgette’s drama. Talk about a body snatcher; there was a natural.

Nimbly directed by the Alley’s Associate Artistic Director Brandon Weinbrenner, this world premiere while fragrant with chills fails to fully deliver. Talky at the beginning with too much exposition, it never catches the fire it promises pictorially. The heart everybody references repeatedly fails to materialize. It beats on the soundtrack, but nowhere else.

A note to the author: You mention Puccini’s aria from Il Trittico, “O, mio babbino caro.” That opera premiered in 1918, two decades later than your play.

The Body Snatcher continues through October 26 at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; and 7 p.m. Sundays at Alley Theatre’s Neuhaus Theatre, 615 Texas. For more information, call 713-220-5700 or visit alleytheatre.org. $45-$74.                               

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