Earlier this month, in what already feels like a different world, I found myself onstage, holding a pen I had swiped from the hotel’s reception desk and reciting a garbled version of the dagger speech from “Macbeth.” It felt giddy, hyperreal and a little like a benign version of a nightmare — the kind of nightmare I still have even though I haven’t acted in almost two decades and my professional career, if you want to dignify it that way, lasted months. In the nightmare, I come to in the middle of a play and I don’t know any of my lines. See? Dreams do come true.
This was on a Sunday morning, the final day of Mohonk Mountain House’s Mystery Weekend. Mohonk, a 259-room resort perched beside a glacial lake atop the Shawangunk Ridge in upstate New York (think of “The Shining,” East Coast edition), claims to have invented the murder mystery weekend in 1977. Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Edward Gorey and Donald Westlake all contributed, the hotel’s program director, Shawn Rice, told us. Westlake even repurposed some of his weekend plots as novels.
I understood the individual actions that had led me to the weekend — a promotional email arrived, I flagged it for my mother, who hadn’t wanted to go alone — without completely grasping how I had ended up there, onstage, improvising jokes about the dining room’s toast. I feel this way about a lot of my life, confident in particular choices, vaguely baffled by the outcome.
My mother had provisioned herself with two snowsuits, a hefty flask of vodka and five quart bags of homemade dehydrated fruit. “What could go wrong?” I pecked into Twitter as we rode up on the Trailways bus. I had come with other baggage: a longtime fascination with the “cozy” mystery (a relatively bloodless form of detective fiction) and a more recent interest in the ways that theater is performed and received beyond Broadway, Off Broadway and the major regional theaters — school plays and religious pageants, theme park shows and cruise ship performances, amateur dramatics and yes, sure, a live murder mystery.
Murder Cafe, a Rosendale, N.Y., outfit, supplies Mohonk with the performers for its yearly mayhem. For this incarnation, “Murder by Magic,” the company had adopted a Jazz Age theme, situating the murder among a troupe of bickering vaudevillians who called themselves Masters of Magic and Merriment. I don’t want to say too much about it, save that Murder Café’s motto is “Killing audiences one laugh at a time since 1998,” and as I sat through Friday night’s first act, a grin plastered to my face like so much cement, that seemed about right.
We met the troupe’s producer, Phineas Phibes, and the various performers: the magicians Lord Taylor and the Great Merlini; the dramatic actress Dame Serena Steinhart; the medium Madam Klotsky; the juvenile singer Baby Rose Bowman; and the clowns Leonard and Julius. Julius was played by a wooden dummy that Leonard failed to ventriloquize.
An hour later, the Great Merlini would be discovered in his escape trunk, visibly breathing, but apparently quite dead — shot through the front, stabbed in the back and poisoned besides. Up until a few years ago, the Mohonk weekend had favored a more serious and interactive kind of mystery in which attendees could grill characters and examine clues, with plants seeded throughout the audience. But Murder Cafe skews lighter and more comic in a way that makes logical deduction superfluous. Who had motive, means and opportunity? Everyone? I guess?
My mother and I had been assigned to a team, the Marlowe Maniacs. Our teammates included teachers, lawyers, an oncologist and a man who was, his wife told me, in “textiles,” most of them murder mystery veterans. We spent our first meeting in a conference room (remember when people gathered in rooms?) equipped with water and a whiteboard, trying to solve the case. The dummy had done it, Paula, the oncologist hypothesized. Or the Great Merlini had done it. Had anyone seen “Murder on the Orient Express”? Our team, I was told, could present its solution in the form of a skit, with points awarded for creativity and accuracy. The grand prize: a two-night stay.
Maryann, a lawyer from Westchester County, volunteered to write our playlet. She suggested a scenario in which Merlini, in an attempt to one-up Houdini, would, with the supernatural help of Madam Klotsky and almost everyone else, escape death. We were assigned parts. I drew Dame Serena. Howard, another lawyer, offered to provide the gunshot sound effects. He first tried, “pop pop,” then “boom boom” and finally “bada bing.” “It’s a pivotal role,” he said, to no one in particular.
The next morning, after a madcap post-breakfast rehearsal, we gathered in the hotel’s parlor for the presentation. One group offered its skit in the style of an old-timey radio show. Another group pinned it on Julius. Then it was our turn, and we hurried up the aisle with that hectic excitement I remember from past performances. Paula had repurposed a hotel bathrobe as a diaper. Her husband, Steve, wore a bathrobe as a cape. The trunk wouldn’t shut on our Merlini. Martin, the textiles guy, played Houdini in the Egyptian gallibaya he had happened to pack. He killed. My mother delivered the epilogue. We lost to the following group, who set their solution to “Memory” from “Cats.”
Murder Café then presented the official denouement, which my mother had already guessed, thanks mostly to a loose-lipped handyman. Baby Rose did it! And maybe also Merlini? I am still blessedly fuzzy on most of it.
Which is to say that I did not solve the assigned mystery, but those few wonderful, terrible minutes onstage clarified — usefully and in this strange, showless moment, poignantly — how little theater needs: a stage, purloined linens, willing humans. As art? Insupportable. As minimally competent communal effort? Tremendous.
Sue, our videographer, texted us the footage; a flurry of Facebook friend requests followed. That afternoon, my mother descended to the reception desk and signed herself up for next year.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
