Arts Entertainment

Reno Little Theater mounts wildly funny “Sherlock Holmes” adaptation

By Peregrine Hart

Arguably remixed more often than the originals are read, the novels and short stories starring nineteenth-century sleuth Sherlock Holmes have spawned a tireless string of adaptations. A vast range of tone marks the — now-fully public domain — intellectual property: Holmes can be found in grounded thrillers, sprightly teen adventures and even the odd paranormal fantasy series.

This winter, at Reno Little Theater, he can be found in the zany slapstick comedy “Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery,” played by University of Nevada, Reno acting instructor Rosie Calkin.

The script is penned by Ken Ludwig, a playwright wellknown for “Lend Me A Tenor,” and it plays fast and loose with the 1902 Arthur Conan Doyle novel “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Its conceit is a staple in the mystery genre: a rich, title-bearing Englishman dies — that’ll be Baskerville. Someone unexpected inherits the fortune. The detective must find the killer looking to cash in on the will before the hapless heir meets his doom.

As far as Holmses go, Calkin is a singular delight. She plays the detective in what’s often called a “pants” role, donning the traditionally masculine costume with unchanged pronouns in the script.

It’s exciting enough to see Calkin take the helm as such an iconic — and overwhelmingly male-casted — character. But it’s her expressive physicality and full-bodied use of the voice that make the performance memorable beyond the subversive casting.

Hers is a chain smoking, cantankerous Holmes utterly unconcerned with the cool he’s been projecting in more recent adaptations. An approach like this shucks the subtle wit we’ve been taught to expect from Sherlock Holmes, but for good reason. He’s actually hilarious as an erudite stooge instead.

Playing well off of Calkin’s Holmes are four other star players in an intimate cast of five. Besides the detective’s partnerin-solving-crime, Watson — played with antsy charm by Ryan Costello — all are employed in the service of dozens of other characters.

To set them apart, the script demands they be loud, exaggerated and wildly inventive. Luckily, Jim Sturtevant, Ian Sorenson and Jessica Johnson, as Actors #1-3, prove uncowed under their deluge of responsibilities.

Where it might otherwise get visibly tiresome, playwright Ken Ludwig skillfully lashes a touch of self-awareness to break the fourth wall for some grumbling: Sturtevant gets to protest at one point over a litany of quick costume changes, and it might be the biggest laugh of the show.

Johnson — whom I saw as an understudy on the show’s penultimate weekend of Feb. 12 — is the cast’s sleeper treasure in the many roles of Actor #3. She shows an impressive willingness to go places silly enough to make any actor feel sheepish and exposed — and then, miraculously, goes even further.

But a strong troupe of actors is only half the battle for a show so invested in plot and action. For the rest, it takes an understanding of the form to make theater really shine. This means knowing its strengths, but also its technical limitations. Where comedy is concerned, both Ludwig’s script and Chad Sweet’s directing actively use all the things a small production usually can’t achieve to grasp at a special flavor of humor that only comes from lack.

From acknowledging the presence of the same actor in different roles to situational gags built into the multi-functional set, “Baskerville” has the advantage of the tongue-in-cheek on its side. Wigs fly, chaos reigns and everyone has a messy good time.

Comedy, however, can come at a price. Ludwig, if anything, tries to be too funny too much of the time, which gives the script a limited emotional palette. When the top-notch lighting and sound are working their hardest to make things gloomy and perilous, you can almost feel an ill-timed extra joke snuffing out the suspenseful flame.

Ludwig is a local theater favorite for a reason. He predictably delivers laughs with a wide and fast net. He’s a total crowdpleaser. Even if you’re among the most jaded viewers, one of the script’s endless gags will get you, and that’s only if one of director Chad Sweet’s clever additions hasn’t already.

But if it’s all you have, comedy can seem a little too easy to achieve. Easier, certainly, than horror or despair or relief. In fact, you can wind up cutting off your actors when they, being good actors, reach for another area of their well-rounded skill set.

In moments, the ensemble at the heart of “Baskerville” will land at a silent exchange with emotional honesty of a different tenor. And because they’re connected deeply with their characters, it’s sublime — until Ludwig drags them back to the jokes like a demanding foreman. One would almost think he’s afraid to fall below a certain volume of gags per minute.

Ludwig’s tendencies don’t do anything truly damaging to the show’s structure until well into the second act, but it’s a doozy. The climax, which is presumably pretty harrowing in the original, bounces off the stage like silly putty.

The conclusion’s central conceit is that Holmes has been uniquely unmoored by this case on England’s shadowed moors. But all the tools necessary to convey this have been slowly undermined by the script. It limits the lighting and set’s skillful building of atmosphere. It cuts off the briefest tastes we get of conflict between Holmes and Watson before they even begin.

“Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery” is so freaking funny — and that takes impressive technical and performance skill; it’s no small feat. But in the end, thanks to the playwright, it’s not much more than that.

Reno Little Theater’s 2022-23 season continues with “Small Mouth Sounds,” running April 14-30 this spring.

Brushfire celebrates edition 75 with contributor gallery

By Peregrine Hart

This March, a campus publication known for its poetry took a stab at showcasing visual art.

When Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal’s first edition went to the presses in 1950, it didn’t accept original submissions from visual artists. Instead, with only writing contributors, it paid student illustrators to hand-ink drawings tailored to each submitted poem.

It was only after a brief hiatus in the 70s Brushfire started publishing the works of artists and writers in equal measure, said Phoebe Coogle, Brushfire’s current editor-in-chief. Today, the journal’s emphasis is still bent towards writers, but Coogle hopes to balance the disciplines and land more submissions from the world of visual arts.

Now, for the first time, Brushfire has opened a gallery to showcase the art from its contributors included in the newest and past editions of the journal.

“We reached out to our contributors from the last three years, since 2020,and we were like, ‘Would you like to send us the originals that you have, or if you’re a photographer, would you like to send us prints?’ and there was quite a large response from our artists. It kind of came to fruition in that regard,” Coogle said.

The gallery played host to mediums from collage to embroidery on canvas. Some contributors like Lauren Sapperstein, whose ink drawing “Koi the Cat” appeared in the seventy-fourth edition, lent Brushfire’s staff the original work of art, bringing a piece they’d already featured in print onto the wall of McNamara Gallery.

Others used the gallery as an opportunity to showcase their range. Hannah Potts, whose poetry appeared most recently in this year’s seventh-fifth edition, dipped her toe into the visual arts realm with a geography-minded submission. The piece, embroidered on canvas in 2020, re-imagines John Snow’s 1854 map of cholera outbreaks in London — without the outbreaks.

“The gallery — it’s not too focused, we didn’t have any grand theme that people had to follow when they brought in their artwork,” Coogle said.

The only stipulation was that featured artists had to be published in the last three editions, and that one of the four pieces they submitted had to be one that was featured in the journal. But even that’s not always possible, Coogle explained.

“We do have several artists who had sold their originals, and unfortunately couldn’t provide them to us,” Coogle said, “so we kind of played fast and loose with the rules we had set.”

Marking the journal’s history at the start of the gallery were framed prints of its first and seventy-fifth editions’ covers. A volume from each decade since its inception led the viewer towards the work of today’s artists.

Notable details included a copy of the 1952 edition’s third volume, which was clearly hand-lettered, and 2010’s sixty-second edition, whose shadowbox concealed an eye-popping page count. In the years since, it’s fallen to 64 pages, though Brushfire’s staff recently managed to bring it up to 76 in honor of the newest publication.

Like all publications, however, Brushfire only has so much money to spare. Coogle’s ambitions to expand the journal’s presence on campus can sometimes clash with the realities of her staff’s budget.

“I have $200 to host things, and hosting a gallery, frames and shipping costs — that’s already run like $360,” Coogle said. “We’ve eaten through all of our host fees and then some, so it has to come out of operations.”

Operations — like compensating Brushfire’s 5-person staff and paying to print each year’s volumes of the journal — ultimately wind up taking precedence, limiting the journal’s already-strained bandwidth for outreach.

“So if we only have the funds to publish biannually like we almost are in our current situation, it means we’re unable to do all these other cool things,” Coogle said. With more funding, she added, “We would print more, we’d hire more people, we’d host more events.”

Also on the docket might be reviving Brushfire’s zine department, which hosted workshops and curated smaller, more experimental themed publications, with more opportunities for students to submit.

Still, Coogle counts the journal’s stretched year as a success. When she ran for editor-in-chief last summer, she won the position with high expectations.

“I was like, I want to bolster Brushfire’s presence on campus, I want to do a gallery showing, I want to table more. A lot of those things have fallen into place,” Coogle said. “We’re a fairly new team, but we all work together very well, and I’m pretty proud of what we’ve achieved these few semesters.”

The Brushfire gallery closed March 17.