On this Memorial Day, I reflect that freedom works best within a few constraints. 40 blank pages to fill gave me too much freedom as a writer. Even to get started writing the script, I needed a matrix of constraints, both mandates and limits. Like the victim's knitted blue bootie, the play emerged from stitches going across and down.
Because the actress Dee Gee Reisinger doesn't like to memorize lines, we've always killed her off after act one. She has played a controlling parish secretary asphyxiated with incense, a prying investigative reporter flash frozen into an ice sculpture, and a crass real estate developer done in with a croquet mallet. This time, Dee Gee took a character from the news: the husband - and - wife owners of Hobby Lobby opened an evangelical Bible History Museum in summer 2016. Dee Gee created artsy-craftsy Celeste Chapel, "like Martha Stewart, only cheaper," and Tom Erb, an actor new to our cast, played her husband, Baptist businessman Elijah Kraft, CEO of the Kraft Kroft. Naturally, Celeste was ensnared in her own knitting.
My friend Susan Rouse and I had another notion that became important to the story. Working from Episcopalians' reputation for being conservative about proper ceremony, we wondered what would happen if someone uncovered a missing epistle from St. Paul to an early Altar Guild, specifying some detail of worship that we've been getting wrong for 2000 years? That gave an opportunity for a newcomer to our cast, Nancy Mitchell, to join the story as Professor Doctor Virginia Howard, archaeologist, expert in ancient Greek.
That left one more actor to be our detective. George Marks is a big guy, who readily acceded to my suggestion that he be a TV detective visiting the church. Since Atlanta's now a movie production center, our parking lot has been a staging ground for studios, and the actor Robert Patrick (Terminator II) really did visit our church recently. The TV detective would team up with the Altar Guild's ex-cop.
With the foundation row of ten characters in place, we had to spin our yarn out across four acts, under 15 minutes each, to accommodate the courses of the dinner. Because we discover the body in act two, we had the 15 minutes of act one for seven characters to meet Celeste and develop the urge to kill her: that's a rate of one motive every two minutes. I sought guidance from the actors, who told me, in character, what they came to this dinner to get, and what grudge they might have against Celeste.
Producers Tracye Kampermann and Christina Toland handed us another important idea when they told me they wanted parish youth to dress up as 1950s personalities. We wrote a hamper full of costumes into our script, and put the body under all the cloth. Acts three and four always have to be fast -- as the audience, well-libated, gets antsy -- and each act has requirements of its own: audience members cross-examine the suspects in act three; in act four, the truth always emerges in a re-enactment of the incidents around the deed.
There's another important mandate. It's a comedy, so we expect a laugh about every third line. During the performance, I kept score, and we did pretty well. There were some flat-out jokes (the cute actor has gone "from hunky to chunky"; a salt shaker in an auction of religious relics is offered as "one ounce of Lot's wife"). But most of the laughs came from putting characters in situations where their most salient traits stuck out. For example, Elijah Kraft, who tried to keep his wife Celeste from donating three million dollars to the church auction, approaches the laundry hamper where the diva and the chef have found a body:
SERENA: Who is it?
ADDIE: Hard to tell. Her face is masked by a giant blue bootie.
ELIJAH: (comes forward) Is it -- Celeste?
ADDIE: ...It must be hard for you, Mr. Kraft.
ELIJAH: Oh, this is terrible, terrible. I don't see her checkbook anywhere!Something I love about the process, something that the audience can't appreciate, is that we really do discover the solution to our mystery through rehearsal. Our cast met one cold day in December and actually went through the motions of what each character did when he or she left the parish hall at the end of act one. Celeste rushed to the corner to await a ride; who followed her? Who was diverted, and why? Who grabbed a costume from that hamper to impersonate an Uber driver? Where did the false Uber car come from, and how did it end up at another church nearby "in a space reserved for handicapped Presbyterians?" How did the murder weapon end up in the sacristy? The most important question came from George: How did the murderer lift the deceased into that hamper, being as "she wasn't what you would call a size two"?
As the performance approached, our friend George was felled by health issues. Mary Nimsgern contacted an actor in our parish, Alan Powell, to take over as detective "Brock Salty." Alan was a sport, learning the lines and staging in just a couple weeks. Then a death in the family took Alan away for a week. He came back, ready to make the show a success. George was able to see the show.
ECW reports that we cleared $14,500, to be used for parish outreach to the community. After more than a decade of mystery dinner theatres, they're looking at other ways to raise funds in the future. Besides, it's not so easy any more for some of us to run across the parish hall, dive and roll, hide in hampers, and die dramatically. So Death in Stitches was probably the last in our series.
I'm grateful to this cast of actors who helped me to realize a life-long dream to write a series of murder mysteries.
Read about others in the series: Church and Theatre: Laughing Matter?; Mystery Dinner Theatre for Episcopalians; and Post Mortem: What Slays in Vegas.
[Photo, left to right: Susan Rouse, Tom Erb, Mary Nimsgern, DeeGee Reisinger, Nancy Mitchell, Jim Chester, Mary Duffe, Leslie Thompson, Alan Powell. Not pictured: Tonya Grimmke -- see the upper-left hand corner of the Stitches collage.]
The place was packed, and we roared approval when Chris stepped out a quarter to six to warm us up. He mentioned all the other times he's been to Atlanta, and, not bragging, but, I was there for every one. He was maybe 19 when I first saw him here; he must be close to 40 now. He's just as exuberant as ever, and goofy but endearing in his head-banging and jumping around with that tiny mandolin strapped around his neck, and his giggling. 
What strikes me now, as always, is that this guy is learning even as we watch. He looked genuinely surprised by interactions with his guests Neko Case, Father John Misty, comedian Rory Albanese. He led an improvised performance of Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King" that cycled through subtle iterations of the familiar theme, and ones that rocked.
