The Boy Detective Fails

EYE WITNESS Pfautsch sees the world through a glass House.

Boy wonders Joe Meno and Nathan Allen team up for this moody piece about the former child detective Billy Argo’s failure to thrive. Adapted from Meno’s forthcoming novel, Boy Detective wears its influences on its sleeve: echoes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster are all detectable, but the key figure here is Wes Anderson, evident not only in the Zoloft-tinged saga of a prodigy gone wrong, but also in the whimsically precise visual design. Yet the play finds an emotional pitch of its own. While the zaniness of several recurring subplots gets a little wearying, underlying them all is a bass line of existential dread, which surfaces as Argo (Pfautsch) searches after the secret that drove his sister to suicide. Argo can’t find a solution for an essential coldness in the world, a failure of things to cohere. Unfortunately, the play seems almost as anxious as its hero to wrap things up neatly; the intricate and disturbing plot ends in a rushed and unconvincingly reassuring conclusion.

Along the way, though, Boy Detective gives the House a chance to apply their effervescent staging techniques to a rich script. From the opening film, narrated by the resonant Carl Kassell, the House’s production displays a seemingly inexhaustible visual flair. The performances, on the other hand, too often opt for a cartoonish tone that belies the play’s emotional complexity. Even Pfautsch, who at his best captures Argo’s heartbreaking vulnerability, elsewhere lapses into arch self-parody. Yet despite its flaws, The Boy Detective Fails remains compulsively watchable; it’s good to see the House slouching toward adulthood.—John Beer