IRT's 'Clue' lifts the spirit of play in concluding its golden season

Out of many, one grand characterization: comical suspense.

Special effects envelop you as you settle into your seat for "Clue" at Indiana Repertory Theatre. The distant and persistent sounds of thunder, lights flickering both onstage and throughout the house, the set heavy with lowering, baronial dark wood.

Memories of playing the board game of Clue will be evoked, and the cliche of a "dark and stormy night" is no longer as associated with apprehension and the thrill of fear as with something playful, even trivial. You have picked up your token and you're ready to go. You will pass the time using your smarts to deal with what the luck of the die brings you.

IRT's season-ending production is built upon the game through the tweaking of a stage adaptation of the screenplay of the movie of the same name. Adaptation is the point, and the murder mystery as a genre is an essential inspiration, but somehow at a great remove. Farce is the obvious direction into which such an elaborate parody has to tend, and this show masters it.

But the star has to be considered the production team, starting with the complementary lighting and sound effects, the design of Jared Gooding and Todd Mack Reishman, respectively. Czerton Lim's set is fixed to maximize the frequent movement in and out of doors, mimicking the chance entrances and exits from rooms in the board game. Large set elements shift mechanically and with clockwork precision to afford the audience views of these smaller interiors, but often we must guess at what lies behind the closed doors. What emerges when they are opened is frequently a surprise as well. 

Cook and Mrs. Peacock savor an appetizer of mutual suspicion.

Benjamin Hanna, the IRT's artistic director designate, directs the show. Hanna has weathered adjustment to his IRT association at about the same time as the pandemic interrupted everything. He has come through several times helming the company's productions, and I've appreciated his guiding mastery of both the sentimental ("This Wonderful Life" and "A Christmas Carol") and the uproarious sides of theater ("The Book Club Play").

Acting in a show like "Clue" must resemble a close-order drill, without much room for working out nuances of characterization. "What should I be feeling here?" is unlikely to be a question worth an actor's rumination. What's projected at the outset of each entrance, especially those of the "color-coded" characters based on the game, governs all that ensues. It's then a matter of making the confusion and all the guarded alliances among people with something to hide and, especially, something murder-related to seek fall precisely into place. Dashing about occasionally coalesces into paroxysms of choreography.

It's hard to boost any one of the portrayals in the performance I saw Sunday as standing out. I took special pleasure in the most expansive of several tour-de-force impersonations, caricatures verging on the overripe.  They were Eric Sharp as the perpetually endangered and excitable Mr. Green and John Taylor Philips as the butler Wadsworth. Tiptoeing amid spoilers, let me bring forward especially Wadsworth's extended death scene. It's a compendium of famous last lines together with a clutch of gasps, groans, shudders, and spasmodic revival. As erect and overbearing as the butler is when standing, Philips's triumph in this role was on the floor.

I half expected one of those famous last words to be "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?," which Edward G. Robinson utters at the end of "Little Caesar." That's not among them,  but it could have been part of such a rosebud bouquet. (The fact that James Cagney borrows the line in the fast-paced near-farce of "One, Two Three," one of my favorite film comedies of the past mid-century, brought it to mind as I thought about IRT's fast-paced full farce).

It's important to make brief mentions of Andrea San Miguel, playing the daylights out of her saucy-French-maid role, Henry Woronicz as the daft Colonel Mustard, Emjoy Gavinu as the cryptic and crypt-worthy Mrs. White, the mega-expressive Claire Wilcher as the proud, brassy Mrs. Peacock, Beethovan Oden as the self-important scientist Professor Plum, and Emily Berman as Miss Scarlet, a woman of easy ways and hard intentions. 

Colonel Mustard and Wadsworth flank unexpected Motorist.

The famous murder tools of the original are supplemented by a red-herring weapon — a glistening cleaver wielded by the Cook, Devan Mathias at her baleful best. Ryan Artzberger is chiefly the shadowy lord of the manor, Mr. Boddy, then moves smoothly into a couple of much different minor roles: a stranded, bewildered Motorist and a Police Chief of multiple brief identities. Kerrington Shorter plays a readily misled Cop latterly thrown into the mix as "Clue" mocks the complications of its genre. 

You may remember from Clue the task of coming up with "Suggestions" as your token enters a room. The rules in our set put the word in caps, set off by quotation marks. That prompts players to realize that they will be a long way from Sherlock Holmes' ironclad deductions. Similarly, "Clue" comes as close as you can get to turning any probability into a possibility and then into a "nah, there's no way that could happen." You'll find it all there at the same time in this delightfully scatterbrained yet ruthlessly focused show, if I might hazard a "Suggestion."

[Photos by Zach Rosing]