Death by Design, Bear Theatre

October 16-18 and 23-25, Community High School Theater, 7:30 pm (Sunday at 2), 2 hours 45 minutes with one intermission.

This production is deeply satisfying: spookiness, intrigue, abundant humor, and fun characters. The night I attended (10/23) the audience hooted with laughter, gasped with shock, and delivered a standing ovation at the end. That communal experience of creating a shared reality together is electric. If you haven't seen it yet, you really should go. This is community theater at its best.

I absolutely love that Bear Theater includes local playwrights in their lineup of plays. This script, written by local author Stacey Upton, is strongest in its humorous elements. Upton creates a "trapped in a remote house, the murderer is one of us" kind of stories that is reasonably satisfying, if a bit rife with loose ends. (*) The subplot about foster care is a bit unrelated to the primary intrigue of Hollywood types sabotaging each other. But it provides a feel-good ending that we definitely need after witnessing multiple murders!

Tina Edwards did a fantastic job with the set - it's cozy without seeming crowded, functional and good to look at. Pam Winchell's costumes were solid, matching the characters without upstaging them. The lights and sound worked great - very effective thunder and lightning, backlit windows, power going out, etc. We really felt the atmosphere of the place. There is a ghost who shows up occasionally to add spookiness -- and when she finally smiles, you will smile right back, I guarantee! 

Director Bob Scott brought out the humor in the script extremely well, and that's the strongest component of this production. Come ready to laugh - it's very funny. Scott assembled a talented cast, who each shone in their various parts. All actors were easy to understand and spoke clearly and with an appropriate speed. The strongest among them was probably Christopher Quiroz, who brought a magnetic combination of likeability and despicability to the part of Demarest, the scheming and egotistical actor. From his affected pomp to the vulnerability beneath it, Quiroz used his charisma to great effect; the audience both loved and hated him.

Other actors also stood out. Paul Mullins delivered a likeable and charming Wilbur. Christa Woomer showed both deep common sense and delightful exasperation in the part of Lydia (and I loved her pink clothing, eyeshadow, nails, and purse!).  Chylynn Belcher as Minnie and Bear Frate as Dodger made a delightful couple of devious innocents. And Stephen Baltz, in the part of the beleaguered and scheming Chip, was clearly having a wonderful time -- and so were the rest of us as we watched him perform. 

I have seen MaryJean Levin in another production (The Tin Woman, Showtimers) and in that other role, she shone like the sun. In this production, she did well as Fern but not as well as I expected. There was an awkwardness between her and Wilbur in the first scene that made little sense to me, and sometimes her lines seemed stilted, like she didn't know how to fully inhabit this character. That dissipated somewhat by the second act.

Moriah Hinshaw is another actor who I've seen in other productions (Never After Happily, Attic; Romeo and Juliet, Bear) and I had high hopes. The role is the most complex in the whole play, and Hinshaw delivered a strong performance, but like Levin, there was some kind of distance between the acting and the words - they came out awkwardly more often than expected, and didn't quite seem natural. She and Levin didn't quite have the chemistry needed to believably bring their relationship to life.

I don't have enough expertise to diagnose it definitively, but the awkward element wasn't limited to Levin and Hinshaw; at multiple points in the production I found myself thinking "that line came out weird" or "this is definitely a play, not real life" - for every actor except Quiroz (perhaps because his character already had a layer of affectation built-in, so any awkward lines still fit well). This phenomenon did not tank the production, but it did create a few disharmonious moments within an otherwise well-tempered production.

It's a play of juxtaposed contrasts. We both love and hate certain characters; we both trust them and doubt them. Some are both bumbling and scheming, devious and innocent. The play overall is realistic, but not. And there is comfort in that. We like murder mysteries and thrillers because we know they aren't real. We can feel fear and discomfort in a controlled environment -- and laugh our heads off alongside strangers who feel the same things we're feeling. It's cozy and creepy, all at once. Don't miss this one!

(*) Loose ends I observed - stop reading if you don't want my party-pooper take on the plot. During a storm, it's rarely the breaker that's to blame for a power outage (it's usually a tree branch on a wire down the road somewhere), so going to fix the breaker is unlikely to turn the lights back on - and this happening three times in a row stretches realism for sure. Also, if Abby saw the others at the airport, how did she arrive before them, and on foot? Did she rent a car and park it somewhere to walk in? And if so then couldn't they use that car to escape/call for help, once they know Dodger's tale of the washed-out bridge is false? Or could they have used Fern and Wilbur's car? Furthermore, how do we know that Lydia really died? Nobody checked her vital signs, they just shoved her into the fridge. Same for Demarest, Minnie, and Dodger - surely someone in the group knows CPR, or at least knows how to check for a pulse. I'm still disturbed by Lydia being shoved in the fridge and having to break her bones to do so - is this pulpy horror, genteel murder mystery, or a ghost story?