Death By Design @ Mesquite Arts Theatre
—Jan Farrington
Playwright and author Stacey Upton Bracey seems to have one foot in Texas and the other in Tennessee. The Mesquite Arts Theatre has now done two of her plays—the first being 2022’s Like Kissing Moonlight. The second is the world premiere of Death By Design, an Appalachian-set murder mystery that’s a riff on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
In a B&B near the Appalachian Trail, the bodies flop and the blood flows, but Death By Design is a lighter (and certainly funnier) story than Christie’s: she didn’t leave a soul alive on her mysterious British island. By the end of our evening, the cast had thinned out considerably, but there were actually a few actors still on their feet.
MAT’s black-box theater has a wide, deep stage space, and set designer Linda Dunn and her crew have used every bit of it to build a detailed mountain cabin, with horizontal log planks, and doors and windows that frame views of green trees and rivers. A homey kitchen is barely visible through a side door, but sees plenty of offstage action. Director Dennis Gullion keeps his cast of eight on the move; there’s a lot of talking in this play, but he balances it nicely with all the physical “bits” the actors are asked to perform.
Here’s where we come in: Retired couple Fern and Wilbur (Sherry Lou Mills-Holt and Steve Iwanski-Sanchez) run a guest house along the trail—beautiful, but isolated. They’ve booked a group of corporate types, supposedly, but when the bell rings, it’s a young hiker named Abby (Zeppelin Hartley), cold and wet, and hoping to spend the night, even on a couch. Abby seems strangely edgy around Fern, a retired family court judge.
When the main group arrives, they are more “show biz” than corporate—they are, in fact, a production team for a movie, looking for peace and quiet as they work on rewrites of a script. Along for the adventure are pretentious actor Demerest (James Mychael); sarcastic ghost-writer/script doctor Chip (Brian Hokanson); snarky producer Lydia (Stephanie Stark); and Demerest’s two minions: jumpy assistant Minnie (Victoria Wells), and a driver/gofer dude named Dodger (Preston Wells).
Don’t get too fond of them: the odds are not in their favor.
Playwright Bracey has loaded the plot like a baked potato with twists, turns, and surprises. Does everyone in the place have a secret? Or an evil plan? An old grudge? Who is the spooky bride? And why do the jade-green chess pieces keep going missing, only to turn up (gasp!) near a recently alive person. Who isn’t, now.
It’s old-style dinner-theater fun, with a serious plot thread (where young Abby is concerned) that touches the heart. As Fern & Wilbur (with Charlotte spinning in the rafters, we presume), Mills-Holt and Iwanski-Sanchez have a gruff humor and charm. Hartley is watchful and tense as Abby, and Mychael’s Demerest has a pompous British accent that’s awesomely awful—I’d guess the playwright wrote it that way.
Darker tones are sounded by Stackler’s wound-tight Lydia and Hokanson’s slightly scary Chip, with his barely concealed animus toward Demerest. Victoria Wells’ Minnie is all over the map, sometimes a comic character, but clearly with some bad stuff on her mind. And Preston Wells (Angel Street/Gaslight/Rockwall Community Playhouse) does a lot with Dodger—who can tell a great story, get a big laugh, and give us a bit of a chill.
Death By Design plays through the next two weekends. If murder-mysteries are your jam, catch this one while you can!
WHEN: Through April 30
WHERE: Mesquite Arts Center, 1527 N. Galloway Avenue, Mesquite
