STAGE REVIEWS : Golden West Finishes Off a Sickly ‘Verdict’

Question: Which is worse: 1) A mediocre play by Agatha Christie, or 2) A poor staging of a play by Agatha Christie?

Answer: Something else--a poor staging of a mediocre play by Agatha Christie.

That’s the dubious achievement of Golden West College’s Summer MysteryFest production of Christie’s near-forgotten “Verdict,” at the campus Patio Theatre.

For Christie fans, alas, it may be near-compulsory viewing. It is one of Dame Agatha’s four original plays, one of her few departures from detective drama, and one of her least-staged works. (The initial London run, in 1958, was a scant four weeks.)

It also is one of her most forgettable projects. It never quite takes flight as a play , and beyond that, it’s an act of almost ornery oddness. The error-prone program mistakenly claims that Christie viewed “Verdict” as “her personal favorite of all her many theatrical writings.” Actually, it was her second favorite--to “Witness for the Prosecution” (the next MysteryFest production). “I would put it somewhat lower on the scale,” Ira Levin diplomatically judged in his introduction to her compiled plays.

Lower, indeed.

Authors can get typecast just as easily as actors, and Christie was obviously weary of the role of Bard of the Whodunit when she wrote “Verdict,” which not only displays the murder in full view but suggests that the husband of the victim may be guilty of a greater evil than the murderer. Christie was out for big game here--and plotting took a back seat to her ideas of morality.

The problems start with the husband, an exiled German professor, Dr. Karl Hendryk (Chris Cleary). His wife, Anya (Marcia Bonnitz), riddled with diseases, moans about “cold, gray England,” not feeling “terribly vell,” and her involuntary exile. Her cousin, Lisa (Laura Mitchell), housesits when she isn’t falling in love with Karl. The Bloomsbury flat is a place of academe and fatigue, when it isn’t intruded upon by family friend Dr. Stoner (Paul Wildman) or one of Karl’s pupils.

Karl favors some (Larry Cardwell’s studious Lester) over others (Julie Elizabeth Brown’s rich-girl Helen), but in the interest of pressing her point that Karl’s idealism gets him and his loved ones in trouble, Christie contrives that Karl must tutor both students. If he shows Helen--and her bribing industrialist father--the door, there literally is no play. Helen, we’re told, gets what she wants, and she wants Karl. That means getting rid of Anya.

What follows is doubly incredible--Karl, for instance, pleading for mercy for Helen, even though he knows she is evil at heart--and it’s unlikely that even an ingenious production could salvage matters. Co-directors Renata Florin and Don Hayes go the other way and manage to bring all the chinks into high relief. Their casting, from top to bottom, is fatal: Cleary is so amorphous that his Karl only can be explained as a quiet madman; Mitchell’s Lisa gives off shivers instead of desire; and Wildman, too young by decades, monotonously and continuously whimpers and earns nothing but audience titters.

More critically, Brown’s Helen is light years from the alluring siren who attracts Karl at his weakest hour. Rather than a hot flame of life and sex dangerously drawing in Karl’s moth, Brown is a striker of poses, so patently false that not even Karl would give her five seconds.

On Friday, the cast didn’t always seem sure how to negotiate the Patio Theatre’s arena setting, but that only partly explained the erratic pacing with too-protracted or too-speedy entrances. Even with mediocre, anti-whodunit Christie, timing is everything. Here, nothing is on time.

‘Verdict’

A Golden West College Summer MysteryFest production of the play by Agatha Christie, directed by Renata Florin and Don Hayes. Scenic design by Jennifer Eldridge. Lighting design by Jon Limbacher. Sound design by Mark Raber. Costume design by Trish Farnsworth. Music by Richard Strauss, from his opera “Der Rosenkavalier.” With Larry Cardwell, Melissa R. Dennis, Laura Mitchell, Chris Cleary, Paul Wildman, Marcia Bonnitz, Julie Elizabeth Brown, William Watts, Robert Morris and Belinda Wilson. Continues July 2, 3, 11, 12, 15, 16 and 17 at 8:30 p.m. at the Patio Theatre, 15744 Golden West St., Huntington Beach. Tickets: $8 and $10. (714) 895-8378.