Accused!
Patricia Milton
Central Works
Politicians and police ranting against immigrants and the crimes they bring. An invading plague blamed on other countries. Threats and fears of domestic terrorists and possible bombings. Suspicion of corrupt public officials. People of color ignored by police. Women’s opinions ridiculed and outright dismissed by the men in power and by the man on the street.
As she did in two earlier new works that premiered at Berkeley’s Central Works (The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective and Escape from the Asylum), playwright Patricia Milton once again packs into the third and final episode of her mystery/comedy trilogy a host of troubling realities facing London in the waning years of the nineteenth century – all of which could very well be headlines from today’s New York Times, Huffpost, or FoxNews. Returning to their roles as amateur yet astute sleuths in Patricia Milton’s Accused! – the 74th world premiere staged by Central Works – are sisters Valeria Hunter and Loveday Fortescue and their friend and American boarder Katherine (Katie) Small. In this their latest challenge, disappearances, murders, a dead body to be disposed, clues in a box that make no sense, and mounting evidence that maybe one of them is the perpetrator being sought all add up for an intriguing whodunit in which the playwright also plants plenty of seeds for occasional chuckles as well as inserts a non-too-subtle commentary how the societal issues of yesteryear are still very much present today.
As Valeria retreats to her garden full of exotic plants and ceramic gnomes after Loveday and Katie have refused to come near her freshly baked scones – the last ones, “even the mice left alone” – in walks a much distraught and anxious Allison Tinglepenny. She is there to deliver from her printing shop some calling cards ordered by Katie and to seek the ladies’ help in finding her friend, Jayne Jones, who has disappeared after refusing to print pamphlets for labor organizers known as “dynamiters” due to their threats of violence.
Allison has just received an anonymous letter declaring her friend is dead and that she is next. With darkened skin, she refuses to go to the police whom she knows will not help someone with her complexion. Desperate for help, she gives to the two women a small box that she says contains three clues, one of which is only a note that reads, “Look at the clues and at what’s missing.”
Immediately intrigued and eager to get back into the swing of solving a case such as this one, Loveday and Katie ask for more information, discovering that the missing Jayne is betrothed to a local cleric, Deacon Morris Manley, who is part of a current religious movement that believes honed masculine bodies and sports like boxing are the ways to immolate the original man, Adam, and even Jesus himself. (After all, look at the statues with smooth, muscled abs that have been made through the centuries of both.)
As it turns out, on the day of her disappearance, Allison was making printing deliveries of boxing posters to Deacon Manley as well as fancy perfume labels to a Frenchman named Blancmange and a book about racehorses to Lord Albert, a former dragoon (or military horseman) recently honored by the Queen and a neighbor of the women. Suddenly, Loveday and Katie have three prime suspects and now need to figure out how to connect to one of them the three clueless clues in the box.
Lauren Dunagan plays with much intensity and acute observation skills the former actress and younger sister, Loveday Fortescue. Many of the playwright’s best lines are given to her (“This whole scheme smells like week-old codfish”) and are each delivered with high energy, a sense of excitement, and also an air of all-knowing.
Returning in a reprisal role of Katherine Smalls is Chelsea Bearce, the Creole immigrant from New Orleans who is a struggling actress sporting a southern drawl in the land of the Queen’s English. Her Katie brings her own special wide-eyed style of stunned, open-mouthed, paused looks to the comments of others she considers asinine (which turns out to be most anyone near her). Together, Loveday and Katie charge full steam into their roles as sleuthhounds, Katie armed with a snapping fan full of metal blades ready to scare the truth out of any hesitant suspect they come upon.
Both are frustrated with Valeria, who – like in their previous cases – would rather putter in her garden than pry into the matters of murder and mystery. As in both prior installments by Patricia Milton of the sisters’ sleuthing, Jan Zvaifler is once again the elder sister and rather prim-and-proper proprietor of the boarding house, Valeria Hunter, a woman who continues to have no patience for fools and who is still initially skeptical and cautious to all of Loveday’s suggested plans of action.
What does spark a look of fire in Valeria’s eyes is when Lord Albert bursts into her parlor asking for her personal recommendation for him to join the London Horticulture Society, to which she pointedly responds, “Lord Albert, your politics are distasteful, and your head is swollen shut with self-adulation … These traits disqualify you.” This outspoken advocate of expanding police powers who claims he does not worry about his promoting the power of police to invade homes without search warrants (“I make the law; it doesn’t apply to me”) also comes with a threat against Valeria. He has his suspicions about the yet-unsolved disappearance (and supposed death) of her husband and threatens to see her accused of murder, something those of us who have seen the first two plays know Valeria does not want to happen.
As in the past two detective adventures of these norm-breaking women, Alan Coyne as yet another despicable man comes close to stealing the show each time he enters the parlor in a one of three, rotating roles. Each of his characters is scrutinized with suspecting eyes by the women whom each of the men in one way or another insults in words and/or actions.
The loud sniffing, scrawny, slump-shouldered Deacon Manley recounts the parson’s latest Sunday sermon, “Muscular Righteousness” at his “Church of the Sacred Sinews” and touts his belief that “brawny men such as Adam have been given ultimate authority over everything … including and especially women.” Alan Coyne particularly comes to sleezy life as his Deacon describes with lustful glee in his eyes the “morally erect,” younger brother of his missing fiancé, Jayne. Bit by bit, Loveday and Katie begin to wonder just how devoted to Jayne this Deacon is and what other designs did he have on her other than marriage.
Conveniently, Suspect Number Two, the Frenchman Monsieur Blancmange, also abruptly makes his way into the women’s parlor. He too is a man who had connections with Jayne and who is also the same nationality as a recently accused bomber of the Greenwich Observatory (an event, like many in Milton’s script, that actually did happen during this late, Victorian period).
Now Alan Coyne is a beret-and-smoking-jacket-wearing smooth-talker who moves with a sliding motion as if on rollers instead of feet. With exaggerated suaveness and multiple expressions that could be poses for a magazine cover, his Blancmange becomes the next focus for inquiry even as he keeps making eyes and unsuccessful approaches to the mostly uninterested Katie.
An underlying comic element is the fact that the only one who can talk to Blancmange is Loveday, since she speaks his native French. Whenever the two speak to each other, they do so in a highly aggrandized mimicking of the French language while actually speaking their words in English, with the other two women acting clueless of what is being said.
But it is when Alan Coyne enters time and again as the nose-in-the-air, misogynist, and power-hungry Lord Albert that he especially dominates the stage. His Lord Albert is both a silly buffoon and a dangerous, devious devil at the same time. With rumors in the air that members of the government are using fear of anarchists and immigrants in order to increase their own powers over ordinary citizens, Lord Albert is yet one more prime suspect for the evil deed done.
Rounding out the in-and-out intruders of the women’s usually quiet parlor is Inspector Perkins, a somewhat sour, female officer who is out to warn the women of a bomb threat on their street. Immediately, she finds reasons to suspect the foreigner, Katie, of the disappearance and probable murder of Jayne … and maybe of the now-missing Allison Tinglepenny. Sindu Singh plays both Tinglepenny and Perkins, displaying very disparate personalities, accents, and demeanors in doing so. A bit like a snapping bulldog, Perkins zeroes her attention on Katie and finds so many reasons to suspect her that even Valeria appears to wonder about Katy’s innocence.
Kimberly Ridgeway smoothly and efficiently directs all the comings and goings from the intimate Central Works setting where actors are surrounded on three sides by two rows of audience members only inches away from the action. Stephanie Anne Johnson’s lighting design casts shadows of period-shaped windows on the walls of the boarding house parlor while also setting the mood of mystery and discovery along the way. Tammy Berlin’s costumes and Michael Berg’s wigs place characters in London’s Victorian Age while also adding humor and nuance to the characters played by Alan Coyne. Gregory Sharpen rounds out the creative team with effects that sound off the nearby explosions and offer musical interludes appropriate for the times.
While overall quite entertaining with a number of surprise twists and turns along the way, Patricia Milton’s Accused! does not quite measure up to her first two staged chapters of this Victorian trilogy. One of the script’s key issues is the sheer number of references to actual events, issues, and prejudices of the period that clearly are meant to be parallels to likened ones today. Some occur in just a sentence or two (e.g., the Russian influenza epidemic and different countries blaming other countries for its occurrence) while others are drawn out in some length to the point of almost becoming preachy (e.g., Loveday’s expounding about the government’s special branch for increasing government/police powers to counter fear of anarchists). Also, the mysteries presented that are more convoluted than those in the previous two plays (partly due again to the complexity of so many, named, current issues/events), with the eventual solution a bit more contrived. Finally, while the first two mysteries are brimming with laugh-out-loud moments amidst all the intrigue, the attempts at humor in Accused! are sometimes much less successful, with only a smattering of mild, audience laughs occurring here and there the night I attended.
That all said, as a big fan of Central Works and Patricia Milton’s The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective and Escape from the Asylum, I was delighted to return to the 1890s boarding house parlor in London to see once again Valeria, Loveday, and Katie in action in Accused! as they parse through vague clues to pin successfully a couple of hideous murders on ___.
Rating: 3+ E
Accused! continues through August 11, 2024, in a two-hour, ten-minute (with intermission) world premiere by Central Works, Works at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Avenue, Berkeley. Tickets are available online at www.centralworks.org.
Photo Credits: Jim Norrena
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