Playwright: Agatha Christie
At: Drury Lane Oakbrook, 100 Drury Lane in Oakbrook Terrace
Phone: (630) 530-0111; $19-$25
Runs through: Oct. 5
Its London premiere was in 1952 and, at last report, The Mousetrap was running there still. But two generations of American audiences have had time to forget the murderer's identity in Agatha Christie's classic thriller and to overlook—even share in—the prejudices of post-WW II English society, making this an auspicious time to revive what remains a chilling good whodunit.
The prototype for countless imitations, the story opens in a labyrinthine old country mansion recently converted to a guest-house by a pair of hopeful newlyweds. Their first lodgers include a squirrely young artist, a sharp-tongued dowager, a mannishly dressed jetsetter, a retired army officer and an eccentric European expatriate. Enter a detective who informs the snowbound party that the perpetrator of a recent urban homicide is seeking his next victim—or victims—among those present. A corpse soon attests to the killer likewise being on the premises, and the game is afoot.
William Osetek directs his all-equity cast with more attention to plot than character, giving the play's contemporary setting a curiously 19th-century ambiance. (Melodrama might have originated during Victoria's reign, but its topicality was—and continues to be—an integral component in its popularity.) And the opening night production was marred by oversights so petty as to be inexcusable—most notably, the number of people who emerge from what we are told is a driving blizzard with their shoes, coats and hats as dry and unrumpled as if fresh from the cleaner's.
But if this laissez-faire approach gives Chris Petschler license to make the fey—and probably gay—Christopher Wren into a neo-Jacobean creepster and Fiona Bergin, to render hostess Mollie Ralston a standard-issue damsel-in-distress, it also permits John Reeger to endow the suave Mr. Paravicini with a polyglot accent as slippery as the proper English citizens—embodied by David Lively's gruff Major Metcalf and Don Anthony Smith's stuffy Giles Ralston—suspect his origins to be. And Brendan J. Gill manages to incorporate some subtlety into his portrayal of Inspector Trotter, despite Osetek's ill-conceived decision to introduce, for the first time in the course of the play, gothic organ music overlaying the Big Revelation scene.