| Actors Kailen Fleck (right) and Lee Anderson on stage in ‘The Psychic’ (Photo: Enoch Wu/The Sentinel-Tribune) |
As the lights come up on the Pemberville Opera House stage and the strains of "Harlem Nocturne"
fade, we meet struggling mystery writer Adam Webster at a most inauspicious moment. The writer, played
by Kailen Fleck, has writer’s block. Not only is his own imagination spent, but he feels all the good,
or even mediocre, mystery plots have already been overused.
Not the best place for a plot to start, and worse for the character, he’s broke.
So he puts out a sign, scrawled in crayon, advertising his services a psychic. Webster has no paranormal
gifts, and even less ability to fake them. Still a client arrives, the beautiful, if aloof, Laura Benson
(Brigid Randolf), and when Webster has an inexplicable burst of clairvoyance, the story begins to
unspool. By the second act the bodies and suspects and laughs are piling up.
"The Psychic" is being staged by the Black Swamp Players at the Pemberville Opera House opening
tonight at 8 and continuing Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
The opera house serves as a fitting venue for the mystery, directed by Hephzibah "Nicky" Dutt.
The stage is open to the back brick wall, and serves as a perfect stand in for Webster’s decrepit
basement apartment. His abode becomes something of a character in itself, a foil for each character. All
enter and comment on its shoddy state, and suggest how its decor could be improved. The fastidious
detective played by Guy Zimmerman even suggests a skylight.
These suggestions help firmly pin the characters into their one, albeit comic, dimension.
No one has any depth, and that’s by design. We get Roy Benson (Lee Anderson), Laura’s shady, scheming
husband plotting to kill her in Paris. Then there’s his mistress Rita Malone (Bailey Oswald), the bimbo
who’s also carrying on with Johnny Bubbles (Jason Wells-Jensen), the thug hired to trail her by the
never seen Fat Eddie Bistro.
The actors get to revel in these theatrical archetypes that seem pulled from "a bad production of
‘Guys and Dolls,’" as Bubbles remarks.
But they and Dutt make sure they maintain a fine balance between the comic repartee, the mystery and the
sense that something is askew.
The interplay between Players veterans Wells-Jensen and Zimmerman is particularly fine. They’ve never
seemed more comfortable and loose on stage. Zimmerman lets his character’s florid elocution roll off his
tongue with a flourish.
As Johnny Bubbles says: "I ain’t heard anyone talk like that since Masterpiece Theatre."
With bodies piling up at Broadway and 72nd Street, whittling down the number of suspects, Webster is
getting the tale he’s been chasing.
Theatergoers seeking faux noir atmosphere and comic diversion with a twist will likewise find it this
weekend in Pemberville.
