Be prepared to be a little spooked and thoroughly delighted by the interactive live radio play at the Oak Bluffs library, “Murder at the Sea View House.” August’s performance was a delight from start to finish, and the one on Sept. 30 is sure to be the same. And while the experience tickles your funny bone, you get to soak in a bit of local history at the same time.
The murder mystery transports us back in time to a real locale, the Sea View House, one of the most spacious and luxurious resort hotels of the late 19th century, located right on the water of what was then Cottage City, now Oak Bluffs. The hotel, which measured 225 feet long and 40 feet deep, had 125 rooms, an office, a parlor, large dining salons, and reception suites.
All of us in the room were, in fact, key to the show. Volunteers played the characters onstage while the rest of us brought the scenes to life with sound effects using our voices, adding the distant clang of a trolley, the howling wind, or the Steamship horn sending out a warning blast when cued.
Allyson Malik, director of the Oak Bluffs library, wrote and narrated the production. She set the stage with a brief history of Cottage City in 1890: Having split from Edgartown just 10 years earlier, it is a town that attracts Methodists and vacationers. Soon we met the initial players:
Cordelia van Wyck (Laura Jahn), nipping at her fourth sherry, is “a once wealthy widow clinging to her social status with her sharp words and sharper eyes.” Clarence Butterfield (Shylo Elliott) is the ambitious assistant manager, who is consumed with concern about balancing the books, and Manuel (“Manny”) Silva (Andy Berry) is the quiet groundskeeper whose father hailed from the Azores, and is in charge of the arsenic to kill off the rats. Lily Dean (Diane King) is the young chambermaid who has only been at the hotel a few weeks, but “the rumors of her involvement with a certain someone are beginning to swirl.” Absent from view, but center stage in a sense, is Nathaniel Penbrook, a wealthy bachelor from New York and potential investor in the Sea View House, who is soon found dead in his room.
As the story unfolds with pithy dialogue, we discover each character has a potential titillating motive. To help solve the crime, Detective Theodore Hargrave (Rizwan Malik) comes to the rescue. Needing assistance, he requests an aide. Audience member Mona Hennessy volunteered, quickly naming her character, Heather Stone. In truth, Malik designed the play so that we all became part of the investigation, drawing clues from everything we heard to crack the case. With everyone enthusiastically playing along, “Murder at the Sea View House” is a hilarious, one-of-a-kind performance where history, mystery, and humor wash ashore.
Although this is the first script Malik has written, she has been involved with the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse Theater Fun for Adults program for a while, which features a lot of improv that she finds very engaging, and lends itself to community building. The experience led her to consider a project related to the library’s goal of connecting people with the history and culture of the Vineyard, and a radio play seemed a suitable option because it allowed participants to read from scripts, eliminating the need for memorization, and included the whole audience.
“I chose a period of time that was well-researched and written about, and is represented by many of the books on our shelves,” Malik explains. A significant number of the books she relied on were by local historian Tom Dresser. She continues, “The interaction part was important, because history can be dry. But I had one job to do, and it was to make it entertaining. I tried to do that in as many facets as possible, so when you walk away, you also remember, hopefully, some of the history.” Since we solved the puzzle using our memories of real facts, clearly Malik’s endeavor was a success.
Malik noted, “One of the reasons this appealed to me was to bring people together. So much of what we do today is on our phones, in a solitary environment. This is a way for us to be part of something that doesn’t exist without everyone working toward it.”
The next performance of “Murder at the Sea View House: An Interactive Live Radio Mystery” will take place at the Oak Bluffs library on Tuesday, Sept. 30, at 6 pm. Free, no registration required.