Summit Performance scores: Gender dynamics and ratiocination far from elementary

Another joke, perhaps? A way to signal the misdirections the play itself cultivates repeatedly?

Probably a simple mistake, insofar as the printed programs for "Ms. Holmes and Ms. Watson, Apt. 2B" tell us that the production, which opened Friday night, runs "March 8-24,  2026." 

We are probably all somewhat date-challenged in an era whose broad, dire scope has us wishing for its conclusion. In the real world of local performing arts, the public has until May 24 to see the Summit Performance Indianapolis show at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre. Believe you me, it has an all-star cast and a production team operating at their best.

Holmes in a moment of endless sleuthing

Kate Hamill's script is loaded with quotations from and allusions to high and low culture as it sends up the icon of fictional sleuthing. Shirley, sometimes Sherlock, Holmes (Frankie Jo Bolda) is shadowed by the trappings of female marginalization, personified by both title characters and negotiating the perennial question of 2B or not 2B in a Baker Street apartment, congealed in legend, placed sort of in our own time and somewhat in Conan Doyle's.

Watson here (Kelsey VanVoorst) is an American physician-to-be subject to career-destroying panic attacks, now trying to get her bearings in London. Holmes is the iconic detective, a parody of Type A masculinity driven to near-madness by seeing life's purpose as threading the way toward solutions of every vexing problem. Watson has the misfortune to be crotchety landlady Mrs. Hudson's (Andrea Heiden) new tenant in the same building. 

Why do things like this happen? How are strangers thrown together, sometimes leading to events of high consequence? Not surprisingly, the difficulty of making connections between cause and effect never goes away in life; in art, resolution is usually expected. Pondering such connections, and setting the audience up for a clutch of red hearings, is a narrator played by Clay Mabbitt, in the first of a few precisely rendered portrayals.

Andrea Heiden as Mrs. Hudson

Artifice is thrown in our faces from the start, and it takes a while to determine what is natural and truly revealing. Performative behavior can be quite entertaining. When the game's afoot in detective work, it might involve, in the service of investigation, clambering into a bathtub containing a bloody corpse, as Holmes and Watson do, with the American hilariously trapped under the victim. 

It's not overreaching for resemblances to find in that scene (before the bathtub tumble) an evocation of "The Death of Marat," Jacques-Louis David's great painting, which is rooted in a historic conspiracy and its attendant mystery. The whiff of revolutionary upheaval wafts over "Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson, Apt 2B" as well. 

More obviously, those who attend the show will have ample opportunity to see a reproduction

Immortal Vermeer painting

of Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" on the wall of Holmes' cluttered apartment. The painting carries with it a host of mysteries, including the identity and costuming of the subject and whether her captivating earring is indeed a pearl.

Hamill's writing is florid and penetrating enough that the show is not dependent on its cultural echoes, many of which went over my head, judging from laugh lines I missed. Particularly germane, however, is a high-art allusion to Puccini's opera "Tosca." As a suspected subversive, the painter-hero Cavaradossi is scheduled for execution, but his beloved Tosca thinks she has maneuvered a rescue for him and their safe escape from Rome. While awaiting his prescribed death, Cavaradossi is lost in recollection of his best days with Tosca. Impending doom stimulates his love of life. 

"And the stars were shining," he begins. It's this kind of memory that Watson, in more prosaic

Ms. Watson, relentless seeker

terms, evokes in the play's rare episode of calm, when we finally are allowed to peek beneath her surface. The episode is heartwarming, and the guffaws get to pause. There are some things you can trust, but there are endless ways to be misled too. Watson comes to know the difference.

Holmes, in her cocaine habit and overreliance on mental shrewdness, resists compassionate knowledge of others. She is nearly derailed by the manipulative allure of Irene Adler (in Heiden's stunning characterization) and the audience must assume her rescue is a reality Hamill has been careful not to overstate.

The performances revel in the script's wealth of suggestion and revelation. Bolda's had galvanic force, her facial expressions reminding me of what Jack Paar told a national TV audience eons ago about Richard Burton's portrayal of Hamlet on Broadway: "Burton's eyes light up the stage." Hers were a match for the predictably nuanced illumination of Laura Glover's lighting design. 

You could go down the production team list, starting with  Lauren Briggeman's vigorous, inspired direction of the show, and find corresponding excellences. The sometimes lofty, sometimes comfy stature of Christian McKinney's sets, the "'wow" factor of Devan O'Mailia Mathias's costumes, the pertinent spectrum of Rachelle Martin's props, with the star quality of a human skeleton and a vigorously worked recliner chair leading the way, Ben Dobler's sound design, confidently straddling the dream and actual worlds, and Jaddy Ciucci's thrilling choreography of fight and movement. All this is amply supportive of performances that grab your attention and willing suspension of disbelief and never let go.

You can have your March 2026. 

This is May madness, and it's well worth your catching it. The stars are shining.

[Photos: Ankh Productions]