Ralston's nights

Even with fine acting, the Mount is stuck in The Mousetrap

by Steve Vineberg

THE MOUSETRAP By Agatha Christie. Directed by Jerianne Warren. Lighting designed by Bob Allen. With Krishna Judkins, Jeff Duchesneau, Rob Houle, Mark Kahn, Carolyn Aliskevicz, Michael Brindisi, Sharon Asher, and Norman Boutillette. At Theatre at the Mount, through October 11.

Agatha Christie wrote The Mousetrap in 1952, adapting her own radio play, Three Blind Mice, and it's still playing in London's West End -- a record that surpasses even the run of The Fantasticks at the Sullivan Street Theatre in New York. And though I understand that hits of that magnitude create their own momentum that has nothing remotely to do with quality (they become monuments), still I'm astonished, now that I've finally seen a production of The Mousetrap, that anything that's been on the boards for four and a half decades could be as bad as this. The story, which is set at a snowed-inn country inn and concerns a mad killer whose rampage is connected to a child's death in a foster home years earlier, is set up so gracelessly that nothing that happens is convincing on even the most basic murder-mystery level. There aren't any characters, really, just cardboard figures stuck around the constricted setting to provide the requisite number of suspects and victims -- actually a fairly diminished number, compared to Christie's other famous stage thriller, And Then There Were None (a/k/a Ten Little Indians). None of the relationships is believable, and the dialogue is wooden. I assume that what audiences get out of the play is the series of plot reversals in the second half of the second act, though I didn't buy a single one.

It's not really the fault of Jerianne Warren's production at Theatre at the Mount that it can't turn a sow's ear into a slick piece of entertainment. Warren has provided a suitable environment -- in collaboration with the anonymous designer of the set, which is very nicely done -- and the first half-hour or so ambles along pleasantly, with some amusing visual flourishes and a congenial company spirit. This version of the play has been Americanized (I assume this is the acting edition most American community theaters rely on), so the locale is a bed and breakfast in the Berkshires, and though the program names its co-owner (played by Jeff Duchesneau) "Giles Ralston," his wife Mollie (Krishna Judkins) calls him "Gil."

The actors look like they're having a perfectly fine time, but the script doesn't give them anything to play -- just one or two emotional states that they stick to throughout the proceedings. Gil is suspicious; Mollie is sweetly maternal and anxious. Mrs. Boyle (Sharon Asher) is snotty and intolerant; Miss Casewell (Carolyn Aliskevicz) is disdainful and elusive; Major Metcalf (Michael Brindisi) is hearty and agreeable; Mr. Paravicini (Norman Boutillette) is continental and vaguely predatory; Christopher Wren (Mark Kahn) is childish and mercurial. Then Detective Sergeant Trotter (Rob Houle) shows up to warn everyone they're in grave danger from a sociopath and to grill them, and he adds another pair of notes -- bullying and pissed-off.

At this point Warren seems to lose her bearings. (Who could blame her?) The staging gets messy and repetitive, and you think you're going to scream if Houle (a far better actor on other occasions) starts pacing again and wags that notebook in his hand one more time. Everyone's performance goes a little out of control except for Michael Brindisi's -- he maintains an admirable calm and looks more effortlessly comfortable on stage than I've ever seen him. The play hurtles toward its climax like a train careening off its rails, since by this time you don't believe one single line or character or plot point and there's nothing the actors can do except throw themselves into the wreckage.

Murder mysteries can be so satisfying on the screen that I'm often baffled at why there are so few good ones written for the stage. The very mechanics of the thriller seem to get exposed in live performance; they creak terribly, and only in very clever, sophisticated stagings can the visual effects provide the feeling of 19th-century spectacle that substitutes for other pleasures. But I don't know what you could do with The Mousetrap to jazz it up, since it's so spare in the writing. Anyway, it's the longest-running play of the century, so I guess every critic should see it once.