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player ready...The circumstances of the mystery genre are classics: A house full of idiosyncratic strangers is stranded way off the grid when suddenly there’s both a dead body and — it stands to reason — a murderer in their midst. It falls to the guests to identify the latter before there’s another of the former.
With playwright Jack Sharkey’s murderous comedy “Par for the Corpse,” Glenview’s Oil Lamp Theater brings both humor and homicide into its cozy confines. The plot points will be familiar to any mystery aficionado. But as the storm-bound residents of a Catskills cabin try to survive the killer among them, the play veers from homicide to humor.
Director Keith Gerth has been navigating between screams and silliness for years. Equally influenced by “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and Alfred Hitchcock, he’s got plenty of experience merging ditz with danger.
“I loved the way people were always hanging out in the living room during ‘Dick Van Dyke,’ and I loved the comedy of it,” he says. That living room aesthetic played a major role in Oil Lamp’s own creation. For its first seven years and 20 productions, Gerth staged the shows in his Lake View living room. He moved the company to Glenview in 2012. “We want our lobby to feel like someone’s living room. Where you’re comfortable and welcome,” he said.
“I’ve also been influenced all my life by Hitchcock,” he adds. “His sense of scene and his ability to create a moment — I’m nowhere near that level, but I can appreciate it. I can watch his movies like ‘North by Northwest’ over and over again, and pick up on something new every time.”
“Par for the Corpse,” however, is more comically “Clue” than “North by Northwest,” with Gerth taking his design cues from the evening wear favored by the characters of the classic board game. While “Par for the Corpse” is decidedly a comedy, he adds, it’s also a clever whodunnit.
“My challenge with a lot of murder mysteries is that, frankly, I feel like they’re an insult to peoples’ intelligence. Five pages in, it’s obvious who did it,” Gerth says. “You need a real mystery to keep audiences engaged. I think this show has that. If anything, there’s too many twists. I’m sure there are some people who will say they knew in the first scene who the killer is, but when I first read this, it kept me guessing right up until the very end.”
“The characters are larger than life, but they’re still relative,” says cast me ‘mber Rachel Silvert, a 2008 Glenbrook North grad. “You can see the real person in all of them.” Silvert plays the hostess of the snowed-in cabin that serves as the play’s setting. Like Gerth, Sharkey’s script took her by surprise.
“Right when you think you have it all figured out, he drops a new piece of information on you,” she says.
‘Par for the Corpse’
When: Oct. 12–Nov. 19
Where: Oil Lamp Theater, 1723 Glenview Road, Glenview
Tickets: $35, $20 students
Contact: 847-834-0738; www.Oillamptheater.org