The opening scene of the second half of the play on Saturday in Downieville’s Yuba Theatre.
DOWNIEVILLE — This past Friday and Saturday evening, Downieville’s Yuba Theatre hosted the Sierra Turnpike Players, the area’s local theater company, for performances of The Murder Mystery at the Murder Mystery. In the play, the actors struggle through a final rehearsal of Putting a Little English on It. In this play within a play, when the lights go out on stage after a loud thunderclap, one of the characters has been murdered – but the murder isn’t in the script. When a parade of people arrive on the set – the police, a drama critic, and the playwright – to help solve the mystery, each asks for the death scene to be repeated, and each ends up dead after a power outage causes a blackout.
As it happened, last Friday night, during a wicked rainstorm pouring buckets of water down outside the Yuba Theatre, only a couple minutes before the curtain was slated to open, Downieville lost electric power. Could the show go on?
Well, once the show’s director, Collin O’Mara-Green, figured out how the curtain could be raised manually, he took the stage and asked the audience if they would still be interested in staying to see the show. “Why not? Otherwise, we’d go home and just sit in the dark,” someone in the theater replied. Thus, chaos ensued.
The cast makes do in the dark on Friday. Photo by Mary Davey.
Accompanied by sound effects (thunder, door bell, eerie music) improvised by the technical crew (Stephanie Villa, Sara Carr, and Maddie Sperry) and line prompts supplied by stage manager Ana Toumpas, the cast (Tessa Jordan, playing a level-headed but snarky actress; Laura Marshall, acting the part of a young actress who is very excited about the world of the theater; Michelle Lozano, a diva with a high opinion of her acting skills; Alison Baca, a drama queen with a thin grip on reality; Hillary Lozano, the Director of Putting a Little English on It who has completely lost control of the production; Theresa Butler, the earnest, reliable stage manager for Putting a Little English on It; Tina Floyd, who drew the roles of two different police inspectors; Elizabeth Lang, assuming the role of an incompetent accompanist; Sandy Sanders - who was subbing for Patrick Shannon because the stormy weather had forced Patrick to work at his real job of plowing snow and rocks off Highway 49 - as an experienced actor who tries to keep the play on an even keel; Collin O’Mara-Green, the first member of the cast to be murdered; Roy Ward, playing a female theater critic employed by The Mountain Messenger; Bryan Davey, the playwright for both Putting a Little English on It and The Murder Mystery at the Murder Mystery; and, Carl Butz, the never dead, sleepy, and hungry actor who plays the “dead guy”), armed with headlamps and flashlights for finding their places in the script (and for blinding the audience), muddled ahead, quite hilariously, to the conclusion of the farce.
Afterward, comments from the audience included, “Definitely a unique experience” and “That was so, so bad … that was so so, good.”
By Saturday night, PG&E had restored the power to the town, and the curtain rose properly, the sound effects weren’t made by drumming on the booth behind the audience, and the cast was equipped with microphones so the audience could hear them – even when the actors were whispering to each other in an attempt to figure out where their next lines might be due. Yes, the inability of the cast to remember their lines or when their time to come on stage continued during the second performance.
However, it must be said, despite (or perhaps because of) all the cast’s gaffes, both performances were highly entertaining to those who attended.