Hillary Clemens in Mrs. Christie (Brandon Parigo)
For its 22nd season opener, Kansas City Actors Theatre is putting on one of its newer plays. But despite premiering in 2019, Heidi Ambruster’s Mrs. Christie feels very much in keeping with the company’s typical lineup of classics and genre works.
Mrs. Christie centers on a real-life mystery from the author’s life, when she went missing for 11 days in 1926, reappearing at a hotel with a possible case of amnesia. The play approaches this mystery from two angles: We watch the author unravel in her present as a modern-day fan works to uncover the truth of what happened.
When the play opens, Agatha (Hillary Clemens) is already at the end of her rope, as she frantically tries to convince her secretary (Erdin Schultz-Bever), her doctor, and anyone who will listen that her dog has died. (The fact that her dog is very much still alive does little to ease her indignation at everyone’s lack of concern.) Between her mother’s recent death and her husband’s increasingly public relationship with his mistress, Agatha is pushed from stressed to well past her breaking point.
100 years later, Lucy (Dri Hernaez) has come to Christie’s home to attend the Agatha Christie Festival. The American has traveled to England in an effort to “Eat, Pray, Love myself into some adventure,” but ends up feeling out of place among both the academics and the cosplaying megafans attending the festival. She sneaks into Christie’s home, looking for something to steal to make her feel closer to the late author, and ends up on an epic scavenger hunt to recover a manuscript of a possible lost Christie play.
Clemens is fantastic as Christie. I’ve never heard Christie’s voice, but spiritually, this impression feels spot-on. Clemes delivers a performance that balances scathing dry witticisms with profound emotional depth as the character spirals into an abyss of anxiety.
Hernaez’ Lucy is a bit more muddled. The script repeatedly tells us that she is a fan of Christie’s work—a big enough fan to (emotionally, if not rationally) explain her spontaneous trip to another continent, as well as her feelings of entitlement to pillage the author’s home—but her motivations don’t come across as especially convincing. Like the author, Lucy is floundering in a chasm of great personal loss. For Christie, her work serves as an anchor amid her internal and external chaos. It seems that her writing is meant to be a similar grounding point for Lucy, but it comes across as less of a driving force than a vague fixation.
The supporting cast adds great color to Agatha and Lucy’s stories, with each actor playing a role in both timelines. Peggy Friesen is especially charming as Lucy’s newfound adventure companion, Jane.
For this production, KCAT has taken over KC Rep’s usual home at the Spencer Theatre at the James C. Olson Performing Arts Center at UMKC. (This is both due to a new partnership between the company and UMKC, as well as a keen move to avoid the World Cup madness currently overtaking Union Station.) Bethany Joy Elliott’s sets play well in the space. A mix of realistic and more expressionistic elements, resulting in a distorted—but whimsically so—reality.
Despite its slightly uneven script, Mrs. Christie is a lot of fun, and Matt Schwader’s propulsive direction does a lot to sail over those bumps. Ambruster’s script doesn’t seek to imitate Christie’s work, but its dedication to the character and its investigation of the murder mystery form means fans of the genre are likely to leave satisfied.
“Mrs. Christie,” a co-production of Kansas City Actors Theatre and the UMKC Conservatory, runs through June 28 at UMKC’s Spencer Theatre, 4949 Cherry St. For more information, visit www.kcactors.org.
