'Over My Dead Body,' Ross Valley Players

Murder most funny in Ross

By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent

Article Launched: 07/20/2006 04:29:00 AM PDT

IN THE LONG evolution of the murder mystery, nearly all modern attempts at giving tired plot conventions an added twist have turned most whodunits into "whodidn't's?" - where the cast consists of everybody who answered the phone and everybody's guilty but the butler.

Not so with Ross Valley Players' hilarious season-closer, "Over My Dead Body," which opened Friday at Marin Art and Garden Center's Barn Theatre, and will be performed through Aug. 20.

Where most murder mysteries present audiences with a convoluted puzzle and all the clues they need to solve it, this playful little play turns the formula upside down, and does so with a marvelous local cast, led by a veteran director of mystery pastiche in the person of Cris Cassell. Here, the guilty parties are established early on, and the audience is let in on the construction of the puzzle, to then experience the morbid pleasure of watching it go awry.

Or does it? Even the red herrings have red herrings in Michael Sutton and Anthony Singleton's farcical tribute to the form, based on a novel by Robert L. Fish (whose writing also inspired the motion picture "Bullitt").

The deceptively simple plot centers on three mystery writers: Trevor Foyle (likeably played with broad strokes by an earnest Mitchell Field), Dora Winslow (done with nearly inexcusable class by veteran Anne Ripley) and Bartie Cruikshank (played by Hugh Campion with all the bemused reserve of the profoundly hard-of-hearing). The elderly trio are the three surviving founders of the Murder League, a fictional society of mystery writers that once counted Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr among its members.

As we arrive on the scene, we find the timeworn triumvirate lamenting their encroaching irrelevance and the fact that the stylish, bloodless murder mysteries, once their stock and trade, have been increasingly bumped off by a newer wave of splatter v}rit}. Complains Hoyle, in perhaps an uncanny prediction of TV's "CSI" (the play was first produced in 1984), "They don't write mysteries anymore É (just) anatomical textbooks."

Taunted by younger colleague Simon Vale (in a suitably oily portrayal by David Shirk), the trio devise a plan to regain their lost glory, "with a touch of the baroque," by committing a stylish murder of their own.

Their plan? Elementary, gentle reader: The victim will be stabbed, shot and hanged in a gorilla suit in a room locked from the inside.

Enter Vale's boorish American literary agent, Leo Sharp (played by Greg Soskin, who nailed it), glad-handing everyone he sees; thus, the problem of finding a victim is solved. Indeed, the moment he shouts "Holy Toledo!" we know he's not long for this world.

Throw in a demonstration of nearly every device ever employed in a "locked room" mystery scenario (as well as a demonstration of everything that could possibly go wrong); a bumbling Chief Inspector Smith (admirably done by John Anthony Nolan) and the dimbulb Sergeant Trask (Ray Martin); a clueless, ancient butler "Charters" (a tip of the hat to Wilfrid Lawson's "Peacock," the cobwebbed butler in "The Wrong Box"), played with the grace of a slow soft shoe, by senior hoofer Roy Harvey; and an unexpected shock of an ending that will leave you as surprised as, well, an aging actor with a paycheck.

The obvious standout in the cast was veteran actress Ripley, who, to her everlasting credit, resisted the temptation to do a startled bloodhound a la Dame Margaret Rutherford when playing Dora Winslow - instead bringing her own unique interpretation and brand of elegant sweetness to the role. Another glaring delight was the idiosyncratic dialect of Nolan's Chief Inspector Smith - think W.C. Fields meets the ineffectual Inspector Lestrade.

James S. Anderson's set design is as much as a tribute to the genre as is the plot, with its mace-wielding suit of armor and judiciously placed portraits of Agatha Christie and Edgar Allen Poe, and the sound design by multitasker Bruce Vieira was good enough to convince you of a dark and stormy night - even on a hot and sultry summer evening.

More a spoof than the intended homage, it doesn't take too much deductive reasoning to figure out whether to recommend this likeable evening of midsummer theater. Leave your thinking caps at home, put on your deerstalker, and go see this funny little gem of a play.

IF YOU GO:

What: "Over My Dead Body" by Ross Valley Players

Where: The Barn Theatre, Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through Aug. 20

Tickets: $15 to $19; Thursdays all tickets $15; Friday, "pay what you will" with limited tickets available at the box office only between 7 to 7:20 p.m. on the night of the show

Information: 456-9555 or http://www.rossvalleyplayers.org/