Film noir is all about atmosphere, and on my way to Lake Oswego last Friday, I couldn’t wait to see how Lakewood Theatre Company would transfer the foreboding style of the genre to the stage for their U.S. premiere production of The Maltese Falcon, directed by David Sikking.

Happily, John Gerth’s moody set doesn’t disappoint. A series of tall beams suggest rooms with the echoing ceilings of another era, and props like an ash tray and black rotary phone sitting on a dark wood desk dovetail with the bluesy music and clouds of dense mist billowing from a fog machine. With the addition of Paige A. Hanna’s costume designs, which include the requisite trench coats and fedoras, and Marcus Storey’s background sounds of approaching police sirens and hotel front-desk bells, Lakewood happily places us in noirville.

As in John Huston’s 1941 film, style rightly takes precedence over story in this production. Despite the fact that everyone is running around looking – and killing – for a priceless statue of the titular falcon, that object is a mere MacGuffin. What really matters is the fictional world itself … and the tough-guy voice Dashiell Hammett used to create it in his 1930 novel. To bring that to life, playwright David Jacklin cleverly sprinkled Hammettesque narration throughout his  adaptation of the book, so we’re treated to delightfully dramatic descriptions of the smell of rain and the sound of heavy footsteps. Even more entertaining are those times when characters narrate their own actions, such as when Sam Spade, the highly sexed but unsentimental detective, says, “Spade crossed the sidewalk.”

As Spade, Ty Boice forgoes Humphrey Bogart’s weirdly appealing mumble-lisp in the film to give us a hypermasculine character. Like a strapping All-American football star, he stands with his hands on his hips and his legs apart, while battering the other characters with his barrage of bellowing. Meanwhile, Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Ashley Pio), the femme fatale who slinks around with her robe sliding off one shoulder, is a vibrant presence, like a splash of technicolor on the muted set. Wearing heels and poured-over dresses with enviable body confidence, she also sports a fabulously shiny copper wig and scarlet lipstick. And with a voice that marries sultriness and innocence, Pio is as charming as a young Bernadette Peters and made me root for Brigid to emerge from the harrowing web of deceit unscathed.

One of the biggest mysteries of the story has nothing to do with the whereabouts of a bird and everything to do with how 2025 audiences take Hammett’s 1930 view of gender and sexuality. Most of the play’s stylized lines are a hoot, as when Effie the secretary (Amber Green), has to work late and sighs, “There’s going to be some disappointed Romeos.” Some of the retro vernacular, though, is less delightful. Of course Jacklin had to keep Hammett’s virile voice intact, but when Spade suspected Bridgid was hiding cash in her underwear and commanded her to strip, or when he swatted Effie’s backside as she walked past him, a siren or two started to sound inside my contemporary mind.

And then there’s the gay issue, which is not a bird, but a floral-scented elephant in the room, with Spade repeatedly making cracks about the gun-toting Joel Cairo (Parth Ruparel) smelling of gardenias. As Cairo in the film, Peter Lorre, with his coiffed curls and creepy smile, frankly fingered his cane and even rested its handle between his lips. Ruparel’s performance in the play is more subtle, but he’s often waving his silk handkerchief, and Spade refers to him as a “lily of the valley.” What’s more, in the book, film and play, Spade is especially antagonistic towards Cairo and his “boyfriend,” the henchman Wilmer Cook (Tristan Roseff) and seems to be watching for a chance to slug them. Hence, his famous line to Cairo: “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.”

Far from calling out the movie for these depictions, though, Armond White gleefully wrote for Out in 2016 that it was “Hollywood’s first gay masterpiece” and that the “movie goes beyond political correctness and into the complexity of Hollywood’s tacit recognition of queerness.”

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What audiences make of the play depends not only on their personal experience, but also on their passion for detective stories from another time. As a diehard Austenite, I understand the nature of fandom and can’t view Pride and Prejudice through a Marxist lens, as my daughter was required to do in her high school English class. In that light, Lakewood’s Maltese Falcon, with its haze of masculinity and mystery, is sure to be seen by noir connoisseurs as dark, enjoyable entertainment.

***

“The Maltese Falcon” will be onstage at the Lakewood Center for the Arts, 368 S. State St., Lake Oswego, through Feb. 9. Ticket and schedule information here.