Death becomes her

Solving the mystery of Foothills' Edwina Black

by Steve Vineberg

EDWINA BLACK By William Dinner and William Morum. Directed by Danny Peak. Set designed by Laura Sasso. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by John Terry. With Laurence Bull, Sheila Stasack, Michael Poisson, and Eve Johnson. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through March 1.

Are the movies more naturally suited to murder mysteries and ghost stories than the theater is? Every season Foothills digs up a thriller in an effort to please its audiences, and in the four years I've been reviewing every one of them has been a bust: Wait Until Dark, Dr. Cook's Garden, The Woman in Black, and now Edwina Black (no relation). And it's not as though there's some cache of creepy classics the company has left untouched: no one needs to see a revival of And Then There Were None or Seven Keys to Baldpate. With the odd exception of a couple of Sherlock Holmes plays that thrive on spectacle (and are much too expensive for a community theater to attempt), on stage a thriller amounts to a handful of characters sitting around and waiting for the sleuth to solve the mystery, or else the kind of ghost effects that movies made obsolete even before talkies came in.

Edwina Black, an obscure English number from 1949 by the team (unknown to me) of William Dinner and William Morum, is about the investigation of the death of the title character, an invalid. On the morning of her funeral, Inspector Henry Martin from Scotland Yard (Michael Poisson) announces that Edwina's aging doctor has had a change of heart about what he originally termed a natural death and has ordered an autopsy. The news throws her husband, Gregory (Laurence Bull), and her paid companion, Lisa Graham (Sheila Stasack), into a state of confusion. They've been lovers for years, and now that Edwina is dead they've planned to go abroad and start their life together. When Martin reveals that Edwina died of arsenic poisoning, they fall apart entirely and begin to suspect -- and then accuse -- each other of performing the dread deed.

Since Edwina Black is a perfectly awful play, this process goes on for what seems like hours, while the lovers keep re-evaluating their positions and contradicting their last set of lines. Meanwhile, the obstinate old housekeeper, Ellen (Eve Johnson), who adored Edwina, clatters around the house, and Inspector Martin makes periodic visits to ask what are meant to be piercing, pithy questions in his civilized British tone. And, in a flourish that only truly incompetent playwrights could muster, the inevitable disintegration of the romance is punctuated by Edwina's offstage demonic laugh, while the lighting designer, John Terry, signals her spectral presence -- we're never told if she's really there or if the characters' fevered minds have conjured her -- with an upstage lighting effect that looks sort of like a fireball in a picture frame.

You probably recognize some of the sources of Edwina Black. The devoted housekeeper is out of Rebecca; the suspicion of homicide that turns characters against each other is stolen from And Then There Were None. This thriller is about as creaky as they come, and at the matinee performance I attended it kept getting the wrong kind of laughs, which suggests that the only reasonable option would have been to play the script for its camp value. However, the director, Danny Peak, leads his four actors through all the conventional hoops, and except for Michael Poisson, whose role allows him the saving grace of underplaying, they come off looking bad. A play like Edwina Black calls for a pre-modern theatrical style that none of the performers knows how to simulate, so they just overact: Laurence Bull flashes his eyes, Sheila Stasack flutters and emotes, Eve Johnson sneers and scowls. Though the play is set in 1928, nothing except the cut of Stasack's dresses (designed by Ted Giammona) suggests the era. Even the music we hear between scenes isn't accurate -- except for Cole Porter's "Let's Misbehave" and one or two other numbers, most of it was written five or 10 years later, and '30s pop simply doesn't sound like '20s pop. (How difficult could it have been to get this detail right?) The entire project is rather sad. It makes you think this whole genre is much better left to the movies.