The set for A Certain Mystery, Brad Rogers' entry into the Baltimore Playwrights Festival now onstage at the Paragon Theatre, is gorgeous. The play concerns a murder at a hoary, highbrow college, and set designer Roy Hammond (who also co-directs the play with Sherrionne Brown) created an elaborate triptych that, from left to right, simulates a professor's office (complete with screened fireplace), a book-lined faculty club room, and a campus coffee shop. It is a splendid and rich rendering.
Alas, the handsome set is the only fully realized aspect of this long and windy work. Clocking in at well over two hours (with two 10-minute intermissions), A Certain Mystery is maddeningly obtuse and painfully drawn out.
Rogers writes in the program notes that his play is conceived to work on two levels. At base, it's a mystery: Dr. Randall Scott (Leo Knight), Haverton University's brash philosophy professor, gets clocked over the head with a candlestick. The college hires psych major-cum-pricey private investigator Will Bartlett (Gordon Embry) to investigate. The play's second and higher level, the playwright writes, concerns the nature of patterns and order. He hoes this contemplative ground by having his characters quote Samuel Beckett, David Hume, and a host of other more obscure thinkers. (The play is set in a college, but sheesh.) His program notes playfully hint that the playgoer might not "get" this overarching purpose. And he's right. That whooshing sound I heard 30 minutes into the play wasn't the theater's air conditioner kicking in--it was Roger's high-minded and inchoate premise wafting over the heads of the two dozen or so fidgety or heavy-lidded audience members.
And so that leaves us with the mystery, which, alas, is also a nonstarter. Mysteries, like comedies, are all about crisp timing. You have to hook the viewers, trot out the suspects, toss around the red herrings and the serpentine plot maneuvers--keep folks engaged and guessing. The pacing here can charitably be called glacial. Bartlett ploddingly assembles his pool of suspects sans intrigue or rising tensions. The maybe-killers include philosophy doctoral candidate Matt Kershner (Adam Roffman), whose dissertation sports more red ink than an Enron balance sheet; the victim's former lover and fellow prof, Emily Barton-Saunders (Debbie Bennett), and her new bed mate, the hotheaded artist Jeff Powell (Ric Herrera); blustery biology professor Pat Halpern (Robin Felix); and eccentric philosophy professor emeritus George Harris (Denis Latkowski). The rush to find who might have bashed Scott's bean in just, well, never rushes. The characters talk; the audience stares. By the time some real intrigue arrives--in the form of cryptic, anonymous notes the suspects receive--I wasn't so much concerned about whodunit as whenendit.
Scott himself makes appearances in the play in the form of chalk-in-hand mini-college lectures that bookend the acts. It's a clever way of conveying the philosopher's animated personality (which Knight depicts vividly). But then intercutting an already static, talky play with all-too-real college lectures (on Waiting for Godot, of all things) hardly keeps things humming.
Most frustratingly, Rogers has some good ingredients here. Harris, the dotty old Aristotelian professor (which Latkowski nails in the show's best performance), is a fascinating character, as is the embittered Halpern (who's ecosystem-based worldview clashes with Scott's heady pronouncements). The insular, ego-ridden world of academia is fertile ground for tales of bloody candlesticks. Rogers, a first-time playwright, needs to go over his work with a script-tightening wrench and a word-slicing machete. And, yes, by the play's twist ending, I did gather some perspective on the nature of patterns (and their ability to deceive), but it was a long time coming. The end didn't justify the means.
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