4 actors, 150 roles add up to '39 Steps'

Music hall performer Mr. Memory is just one of . . . well, Cliff Saunders can't quite remember how many roles he plays in the Huntington Theatre Company's production of "Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps." A lot.

Saunders is first seen as an actor setting up for a bare-bones stage production of the classic thriller. Then the show begins, and he steps on stage as Mr. Memory. And then . . .

"After that, I play a cleaning lady. And then I play a salesman. And then I play these kind of thugs. Then I play a policeman. Then I play a different policeman. A crofter, a kind of farmer. Then I play a posh upper-class lady - that's a bit of a challenge for me, not the lady part, but the upper-class part," he says. "I play an old guy who works in a political party. I play a Cockney usherette. A detective. Oh, God, let me think. There's a bunch of them. A pilot. Oh, and I play a rock. I play a thorn bush. I play a waterfall. I play a river. Stupid stuff like that."

Saunders and Arnie Burton play the actors listed in the script as the Two Clowns, and they tackle roughly 100 or 150 different roles between them, depending on who's counting. Jennifer Ferrin plays three key women. And star Charles Edwards has what you might think the easy part: He just plays one role, Richard Hannay, the everyman hero.

A shooting during Mr. Memory's act brings Hannay in contact with a mysterious beauty who claims to be a spy. When she turns up dead, Hannay is pursued by police and bad guys alike as he races from London to the Scottish Highlands in pursuit of a secret plot.

Hannay is "the classic Hitchcock wronged man who knows too much, the innocent on the run," says Edwards.

Outwardly, "The 39 Steps" closely follows the 1935 Hitchcock film, which was very loosely based on a 1915 John Buchan novel and starred Robert Donat as Hannay. But playwright Patrick Barlow created something different still for this broadly comic adaptation with a cast of four.

As director Maria Aitken envisions it, "There's a tatty little theater company where this leading man wants to play Richard Hannay, and he's far too grand to move any furniture or change his clothes. And there's a leading lady who's actually quite pleased to have a crack at three very different women's parts, and she reluctantly moves a bit of furniture here and there when she has to.

"And then there are these two old vaudevillians who have somehow washed up in the theater company, and they have to do virtually everything else and save the play," Aitken says. "I think the subtitle should be, 'There Aren't Enough of Us!' "

Or as Edwards puts it: "The whole premise of it is that it is these four actors who got together and said, 'Let's do "The 39 Steps" on stage.' So within that you get plenty of scope for things going slightly wrong, a bit of bad temper between the actors on stage. It's also great fun to play when things go slightly wrong. Actors always love that."

The minimalist cast was the concept of an earlier writing team. Barlow was first brought on board roughly five years ago with the idea that he would play Hannay, he says, but instead he ended up rewriting the entire production. He's an expert in this sort of thing, as founder of Britain's National Theatre of Brent, a satirical outfit that's become a cult favorite thanks to two- and three-man productions such as "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and "Wagner's Ring Cycle."

"It started as a joke, really," he says by phone from London, "as a satire on the National Theatre, which had hundreds of people on the payroll . . . [but] we discovered there was theatrical gold there. To do it very purely and simply with two actors and a chair was theatrical diamonds."

In "The 39 Steps," he says, it's important to balance the high jinks with the story of Hannay and how his adventure rescues him from despair.

"I love the material, I'm not trying to make fun of it," Barlow says. "It's a pastiche, a kind of loving making-fun-of. But it's equally an actual thriller that the actors have to take very seriously."

Words like "dizzying" and "rollercoaster" pepper the reviews of the London production.

"For everybody in the show, its very physically tiring, because it's frantic for everybody," Edwards says. "But less so, I suppose, mentally for me, because the other guys have got to remember so many changes, so many quick changes to do, whereas my responsibility is to keep the story motoring on."

Aitken and Edwards were the key players from the start of the London production, which started out at the small Tricycle Theatre and moved up to the Criterion in the West End. After the Huntington, this production is headed for Broadway at the end of the year.

"Maria now has the blueprint of the show which worked very well in London," says Edwards. "But that's not to say there isn't room for reinvention. With three new actors you're going to get a whole lot of new stuff coming in."

"You have new talents on offer, and it would be criminal not to exploit what you get," says Aitken. "But there is a pattern to it. It has a soundtrack virtually, so some of the rhythms have to be adapted to that."

And how, truly, do the Two Clowns manage all those changes?

"There's one scene where I'm playing three characters at once - a porter and an officer and a salesman - and each one has a different hat," says Saunders. "Switching hats and the physical position of the body, that helps me click into the muscle memory that hopefully will send the message to my voice to do the right accent."

And if not, well, probably it will get brushed off as another comic screw-up of this "tatty" little company.

Despite the myriad challenges of the production, there's something elemental at its heart, Aitken says.

"The whole point about this is an homage to theater, even though it's trying to do a film. It's done with smoke, four trunks, and three ladders, and that's it," Aitken says. "Of course, the world's most sophisticated sound and lighting [too]. But it is an actor's piece. I think that's what audiences love. They're not tired of gigantic music with trillions spent on the set, but it is rather great to go and see something where that is not the preoccupation. Where some sort of magic is made out of nothing, or apparently nothing."