"Towards Zero"
boils with Agatha Christie finesse
By Melissa Lee
Special to the Free-Press
The Silver Spring Stage cast gets a real stew brewing with their current production of Agatha Christie's "Toward Zero." A brew of visual and verbal ingredients boil in a melting pot mish-mash of furnishings and linguistic preferences.
Lady Tressilian's (Jean MacKenzie) 1950 period drawing room in Cornwall County, England, shows her eclectic taste for homey decor. With Tressilian's wealth one might have thought her taste in furnishings to include some 18th century English pieces, a wall clock with Westminister chimes, velvet or satin drapes and a fireplace. Considering all in sight, however, her drawing room has the homeyness of an American home rather than English.
The cast, too, shows a varied interest, particularly in languages, with a variety of accents ranging from a touch of cockney to Americanized English somewhere between New Jersey and North Carolina. Besides their choice of accents, the cast ranges from being ideally suited for a role to exemplifying the director's eccentricity in pairing opposites.
"Toward Zero," on the mystery measure scale, falls somewhere between the serious made for television Agatha Christie fllms and the zany Pink Panther movies. Scotland Yard constables Superintendent
Battle (Alex Takach), Inspector Leach (Louis Levy), and assistant P.C. Benson (Gerard Byrne) -hover with farcical finesse, putting their fingers on the sure suspects and rivaling the Three Stooges with their own facial expressions.
Both the cast and Agatha Christie are good at
getting down to business of tossing out clues, murder
victims and suspects. At the start the Lady Tressilan
hints that Mathew Treves (Bradley Litchfield) is a
criminologist at heart. And true to form, Treves'
shrewd detecting and artful pondering makes him a
perfect Agatha Christie sleuth.
Absorbed in conversation from Thomas Royde
(Keith Brown), Mr. Nevile (Gordon Comption), Kay
Strange (Sue Klitsch), Audrey Strange (Erin O'Brien)
and Lady Tressilian, the audience, too, feels that
something unusual is brewing. Treves caps the
situation suggesting an odor of gunpowder in the air.
Just for good measure, lots of red herrings throw
suspicion away from the real motives and murderers.
There are extra characters, for example. Mary Aldin (Mona Brussat), Lady Tressilian':; personal assistant, is obviously above suspicion until mentioning that she hates Tressilian, Ted Latimer (John Edmonds), who is rather chummy with the present Mrs. Strange, is a strangely mysterious sort of fellow.
Kay, the present Mrs. Strange, and Audrey, the ex-Mrs. Strange, have their hearts set on the trust fund in question -going to young Nevile upon Lady Tressilian's death. And so does Nevile, a grown-up brat who has everything.
The clues stack up in favor of Lady Tressilian or young Nevile as the victim, and Kay and Audrey Strange and the strangely mysterious Ted Latimer as the murderers. And when the cast rouses audience screamers to scream, it's a sure thing that the mishmash
of ingredients and a zany mystery do make for an Agatha Otristie murder....
