Murder, She Read

This week’s staged reading at Coach House was called “Butter in a Lordly Dish.” Aside from the incredibly obscure biblical reference in the title, the story was quite entertaining. It ran only about thirty minutes, and more than half of that was set up for a wonderfully murderous payoff.

We first meet two Cockney house servants gossiping about murderers in the news. The focus of their conversation is whether a man convicted not long ago of killing several young women was really the reprobate murderer he was made out to be by his lawyer. Next we meet the lady of the house they serve in, who is visited by a female friend. Their conversation reveals that the lady’s husband has, at the very least, a roving eye, if not a multitude of affairs. Her friend clearly disapproves of both the implied infidelity and the lady’s long-suffering attitude toward it, especially in light of her two children. The husband enters, and his pomposity is surpassed only by the lady friend’s verbal barbs at him. Through surprisingly natural turns of conversation, we learn that the husband is the very lawyer who managed to convict the murderer discussed earlier by the two servant women. The lady friend questions how the lawyer/husband could be so sure the man was guilty when there was almost no physical evidence against him and the man’s wife testified that he had been home during each of the murders. This provides the lawyer/husband the opportunity to remove any doubt from the audience that he has any ethics at all. He particularly wanted to convict the man because he clearly looked like a murderer and he felt the women on the jury were in danger of falling in love with the dastardly fellow. Besides, he says, women’s intuition is a myth and women cannot be trusted to understand law or facts or reality. He leaves abruptly to catch a train for what the lady friend suspects is an extramarital tryst.

The next scene—revealed as such by way of masterful sound effect, which I’ll get to in a moment—is on that train, where the husband/lawyer has, indeed, met up with his latest lover for a weekend away. She is taking him to some sleepy town far from the beaten path for their clandestine affair. When they get to their love nest, he wants to fool around, but she insists they dine first, as she has worked hard to prepare a special meal for the two of them. This scene includes the title line, which gives the audience the first whiff of impending violence. Their conversation turns from the splendor of their meal to that same convicted murderer—again by turns that seem quite natural. While sipping an after-dinner coffee, the man becomes expansive, waxing romantic about his prowess as an attorney and his good fortune at spending a lover’s weekend with this fine, fine woman. Eventually, he yelps in pain, as his body is gripped by camps. The woman feigns concern. He chalks it up to fatigue, and their conversation of the murderer’s trial continues. More howls about painful cramps punctuate his pomposity. The audience begins to understand what is to come. Can you guess?

One woman did the voices of three different characters: one of the Cockney servants, the female friend of the lady of the house, and the lawyer’s latest lover. I was astonished at how different she sounded with each character. Without leaving the stage, she changed her posture slightly and her intonations entirely for each one. Just before launching into the third character, she took a ponytail holder out of her long brown hair, allowing it to cascade along her shoulders. This small affectation made her a completely different person. I sat less than ten feet away from her and got the impression that she had left the stage and another person had entered. Remarkable.

The real star of the show, however, was Chalker, whose acquaintance I made last week. While the four actors read their lines from the stage, he occupied a chair on a small dais off to stage left, surrounded by a French-style telephone, bottles, papers, bags, lights, and boxes of varying shapes and sizes. At various times throughout the performance, Chalker opened and closed a tiny door in one of the boxes, blew across the top of a bottle, shook a box of matches, rummaged in a bag, stomped his feet, rattled papers, fitted a metal key into the slot of a lock, rotated the phone’s dial, and slammed the receiver onto its cradle. His machinations transported the actors’ words from a plain stage in Akron to a British kitchen, an upper-crust parlor, a moving train, and a country cottage. My aural memory actually sees those scenes playing out in specific and detailed settings, all due to those sound effects.

For the very final scene, Chalker delivers a literal death blow. As you may have guessed, the lawyer’s cramping and howls of discomfort derive from a paralyzing substance his lover has put into his after-dinner coffee. She, of course, is not some random stranger he met in London but the wife of that man convicted of killing several women. His conviction resulted largely from the lawyer’s ability to convince a jury that, even without physical evidence, the man “appeared” guilty and should be hanged. The woman reveals to both the lawyer and the audience, just before driving a pike into the lawyer’s temple—a la that obscure biblical reference—that the convicted man was, in fact innocent of those murders. She knows this without a doubt because she, of course, was the murderer. She hated those women because of her husband’s wandering eye and lack of fidelity, much as she hates the lawyer for his possessing these same qualities.

As she was revealing the story to the audience, Chalker very quietly placed a round melon with a magic-marker face on top of one of his wooden boxes. The face comprised Xes for eyes and a tongue lolling from its mouth. He wielded a large peened hammer and placed a long metal spike on the melon, at precisely the place where a temple would if it were a human head. The heavy, wet thunk of that spike being pounded into the melon made for a viscerally imaginative ending to the play, evoking ohs, ahs, and macabre laughter from our packed audience.

Bravo!