This play was originally developed by Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. This little tidbit makes sense once you’ve seen the show, as it’s a perfect example of a farce, a theatrical style much favored by Shakespeare. The thing about a production like Murder for Two is that it absolutely will not work if the performers aren’t supremely talented. After all, as Edmund Gwenn supposedly said, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” A play like this pays high tribute to the spirit of that alleged quote, but thankfully for Memphis audiences and Quark Theatre fans, the cast and crew were more than up to the task.
Murder for Two is simple, as far as plot goes. A closed-room “whodunnit” that puts me in mind of Agatha Christie, complete with the requisite deceased non-entity, the aspiring and not-so-intrepid detective, and a slew of eccentric potential suspects. The comparison stops there, however, as this is a play that knows it’s a play. The fourth wall is more like a fourth screen door between the audience and the actors (and at one point the audience briefly becomes the cast). Speaking of the cast, as the name of the show implies, there are only two performers onstage. My above list of stock characters contained within this musical means one performer plays many parts. Such a trick is meticulous, requiring overtly punctilious character development, so that the constant switching between props, accents, vocal qualities, and mannerisms can be obvious and immediately recognizable. This feat fell to Nathan McHenry, who played a multitude of characters. The other role in the play went to Eileen Kuo, who obliquely, in a way, clued the audience in on the presence of an invisible (to us) character named Lou.
When writing about the theatrical goings-on in Memphis, it’s not often I find myself wishing for a look at the text. I would love to get my hands on the script for Murder for Two just to see what in this production was written as stage directions and what the purview of the directors was. Yes, directors, plural. This show was co-directed by Kuo and McHenry, and this makes a lot of sense. I’m awestruck at them for taking on such a Herculean task. The two had close chemistry onstage, both with the show itself and each other, and Murder for Two was wonderfully entertaining to watch, but it also seems like the type of show that takes a gargantuan amount of work to pull off. Farces call for constant action, endless entrances and exits, and, in this particular production, quite a few musical numbers. They’re all performed entirely by Kuo and McHenry, who both sing and play the piano, among other instruments, throughout the show. It’s a play filled to the brim with minutiae, from a production standpoint, but I believe the audience felt that the payoff was well worth the effort. (I overheard one person remarking upon exiting the show that their face hurt from laughing so much.)
I can tell you, without having read the script, that the writing by Kellen Blair and Joe Kinosian is superb. Everything is set up perfectly for a gifted comedian, and Nathan McHenry showed the extent of his prowess onstage by running absolutely wild with the material, in the best possible way. Eileen Kuo, as the more “straight” side of the duo, played her character, Marcus, on the opposite side of the spectrum of campy. It put me in mind of a bygone era, the type of deliberately “overdone” performance one would see in The Three Stooges, and it worked as a perfect balance to the madness of McHenry’s company of characters.
Murder for Two makes a joke, midway through the production, about the slow demise of American theater. But as long as cities like Memphis keep giving space to companies like Quark Theatre and performances like this one, I would argue that American theater remains alive and well.
Murder for Two runs at TheatreWorks through August 30th.
