Theater Review—

Humorous ‘Murderers’ At The Little Theatre

By Julie Stern

The Town Players’ Little Theater is an ideal venue for a play like Jeffrey Hatcher’s trio of dramatic monologues, Murderers. The intimate surroundings make a perfect setting as the three performers reveal their secrets, each in turn, confessing to the audience that “I am a murderer.”

Set in the Riddle Key Luxury Senior Retirement Living Center and Golf Course, near St Petersburg, Fla., the three characters are master story tellers, sucking in the audience with their narrative twists.

In “The Man Who Married His Mother-in-Law,” Gerald Halvorson explains how he came to marry “Spiff” the blue-blooded mother of his long-time girlfriend, in order to avoid inheritance taxes after Spiff was diagnosed with a fatal illness. (It was her idea, not his. She wanted her sizeable fortune to pass on to her daughter without having to share it with the IRS.) They move down to Florida to do this, in order to save embarrassment back home in Lake Forest. But the complications ensue, once they move into their two bedroom condo…

In “Margaret Faydle Comes to Town,” Lucy Stickler is a slighted wife, who discovers that the woman who had an affair with her husband back in Wisconsin (and cheated with every other man in town as well) has arrived in Riddle Key, brazenly searching for friendship and more from the ranks of the Viagra set. To paraphrase Shakespeare, hell hath no fury like Lucy Stickler, who with her bland, middle-western cheeriness, gives us the lowdown on how she planned the perfect crime…

“Match Wits with Minka Lupino” is told by the young woman who works as an assistant in the community sales office, where she witnesses the cruel ways in which the old people who live there are preyed upon and exploited by everyone from greedy relatives to corrupt policemen to sinister health aides. A devotee of murder mysteries, she decides to take matters into her own hands and becomes a serial killer — in the interest of justice…

Director Ruth Anne Baumgartner has gotten excellent performances from her three actors. Christopher Bird is self-deprecatingly sheepish as Halvorson, bemused by the ironies that follow him. Alice McMahon is convincingly real as Lucy Stickler, while Elise Bochinski is a wonderful mix as the ditzy but clearly kind-hearted Minka.

With the bizarre twists and the droll send-up of the day-to-day realities of a retirement community, the stories generate plenty of belly laughs from the audience, while the strict conventions of  the genteel Agatha Christie style mystery genre allows us to enjoy these tales of murder, and even to have us root for the murderer.

Playwright Hatcher has added an underlying darker layer here, however. This is a play about aging and its consequences. The people who leave Illinois and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to move to Riddle Key are being sold a bill of goods about granite countertops in their new villas, the beautifully landscaped golf course,  the ballroom, the boutique shoppes, and the on-site medical care, but there is a reason that they sign up for five year leases, rather than buy for a longer period.

The one unifying character in the three stories is Dr Gupta, whom everyone sees, before he sends them for tests, for consultations, for treatments, for more medications… There is an on-site crematorium at Riddle Key as well. They have left their old homes, their friends, their history, to come to this Brave New World, as they fight the ravaging tide of mortality. This isn’t part of the plot, but it is the backstory that gives the plots their poignancy, even as we laugh, knowingly.

Murderers is not a play for young children, but it is highly entertaining and appropriate for adults, young and old. Whether we see ourselves, our parents, or our adult children, we can get a kick out of all the details we recognize, and the panache with which the trio of performers carry it off.

 (Performances continue weekends until September 5 at The Little Theatre, on Orchard Hill Road. Call 270-9144 or see the Enjoy calendar for performance and ticket details.)