The Exorcist

Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles

(310) 208-5454

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Playwright John Pielmeier has “some big, gore-soaked shoes to fill,” said Paul Hodgins in the Orange County, Calif., Register. The 1973 film version of The Exorcist, about the satanic possession of a child, rose to iconic status on a mix of “sex, violence, projectile vomiting, and religious desecration.” Yet a stage version requires more than special effects to succeed, which must be why Pielmeier’s script adheres closer to the 1971 novel, shifting the focus from horror to “issues of guilt, faith, and the rocky path to redemption.” The result, alas, is a story that’s both “relatively bloodless” and downright absurd in its pretentiousness. Early on, a priest speaks this line: “For anyone who doubts the existence of the devil as I once did, I have three words. Auschwitz. Cambodia. Somalia.” Not only does the sentiment underscore the obvious; it’s in questionable taste to drag real-world horror into a pulpy fright fest.

We can’t hold the actors responsible for Pielmeier’s “diabolically stilted dialogue,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. But while Emily Yetter provides a “tender and otherworldly” performance as the tormented girl, most of the cast fails to transcend the material. Brooke Shields, playing the child’s mother, “lends her lines a B-movie obviousness that cries out” for “the mystical skills of an acting coach.” It’s a shame that such failures squander the “frightening elegance of the stagecraft” of Scott Pask’s “strikingly original scenic design.” A new Exorcist could have been “a devilishly good time.”