There’s no pro like an old pro, and “An Old-Fashioned Family Murder,” at New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse through November 2, has three of them proving the point.
Among others.
The veteran pros are so deft, it’s difficult to decide whom to praise first.
There couldn’t be a production without playwright Joe DiPietro, whose sense of stagecraft never fails and who has done something that has eluded other writers since the vogue of merging mystery with comedy emerged with “The 39 Steps” and various Sherlock Holmes takeoffs. That is putting the mystery first while making the comedy incidental and keeping people guessing who the killer might be until they just can’t wait any longer to know.
It isn’t a matter of DiPietro using suspense, though that is abundant enough, as him juggling clues that send us pinballing from one suspect to another, so we can’t center on exactly whodunnit.
DiPietro also has a knack for sneaking references to noir movies of 1940s Hollywood in “An OId-Fashioned Family Murder.” They never dominate, but it’s fun to catch a moment that makes you think of Lauren Bacall or Dick Powell for that instant.
DiPietro is ripe for kudos. He created a sturdy, entertaining piece that may not absorb or have you at the edge of your seat, but that amuses and engages grandly and provides an old-fashioned good time. “An Old-Fashioned Family Murder” should make regional rounds throughout the country in the next few years.
DiPietro is in high form, but the pro who rates lavish appreciation in the best known person in director Larry Raben’s cast, Sally Struthers.
Struthers not only keeps the pace and timing of a Derby winner. She does something more remarkable. She emerges as the production’s star, not because she’s been famous for 55 years or because DiPietro provides her with wonderful lines, but she has such a sure sense of how to integrate comedy into mystery, how to nurse a line to maximum effect, and how to remain subtle in ways you may not expect while letting her character branch out with some quirks, dances, and hijinks that always fit that character and the business of the moment.
Struthers doesn’t rest on copious laurels. She creates someone who is definitely in her wheelhouse — DiPietro created the character with her in mind — but who shows you a different side of Struthers’ repertoire, a slyer, more teasing side that makes her character, the widow of a renowned detective who has some sleuthing skills of her own, comic by timing and seeming to know just what to say rather than by selling jokes and working for laughs.
The laughs come organically. Struthers knows just where to accent a line or pause or slur one for full but not hammy effect. Her Shirley Peck becomes a character you want to see and hear a lot from. Because she, as played by Sally Struthers, remains so real while being genuinely funny, coyly helpful, and smarter than anyone else in the room, including a famous mystery writer who thinks he knows how murder works and can be committed undetected and Mrs. Peck’s son, a fledgling detective who needs some hints as he tries to copy his father’s dazzling career.
It might amuse Sally, or delight her, that in the lobby after the play ended, a woman was explaining to her grandson what “All in the Family” was and how Struthers came to lasting prominence through that show. The teen never heard of the show or any of its nuclear cast.
Eavesdropping further, it turns out Struthers acquired a new fan who knew nothing about her decades-old achievements or even her stint as the nosy neighbor on “The Gilmore Girls,” but only what he saw at George Street.
Struthers’ experience shows. She takes the stage at a moment that doesn’t allow for entry applause and earns a standing ovation for acing a performance in every way possible.
She cleverly insinuates Mrs. Peck wherever it’s necessary while making the most of times when Raben leaves Mrs. Peck on the stage alone.
Then, in perfect character, Struthers can be a bit broader, dancing toward a record player — “An Old-Fashioned Family Murder” is set in the ’40s — lip synching and miming a dramatic aria, then mocking opera by singing it in her own voice (with a purpose that time, to nudge her son toward an obvious clue he hasn’t quite gleaned). She also has fun with a hinge-backed chair that goes a little too far in one sequence. (Wheeeee!)
In point, seeing Sally Struthers in “An Old-Fashioned Family Murder” is seeing a knowing master, with a lot in her kit bag, at work. She certainly lives up to whatever DiPietro expected from her when he built Mrs. Peck based on seeing Struthers in a musical he wrote at Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse a few seasons back.
No one in the theater works wonders alone.
DiPietro’s script is breezy but also a master class in how to construct a play while keeping simultaneously a mindteaser and a comedy.
Larry Raben certainly has a lot to do with the George Street production’s success. Except for one sequence in which one character asks another to get tea when a tray with unpoured tea has just been moved upstage, Raben’s direction is pinpoint.
Including how to both make sure an audience sees what will become a salient clue, though possibly not marking it at the time, and how to deflect attention so that things or people can appear or disappear as suits DiPietro’s plot.
Raben also finesses one of the niceties of DiPietro’s play, the double meaning of “family” in the title. In Agatha Christie tradition, “An Old-Fashioned Family Murder” involves the murder of a family member who lived among now-suspected relatives who reside in a rambling remote family mansion, on a rainy night with the local roads flooded no less.
It is also a story about a mother bolstering her son in ways that not only assist the lad in attaining needed status as a police detective but shows the role she played in his father’s fabled career.
Which brings us to the third old pro, Tony Carlin.
Carlin plays a famous detective novelist whose last few books, as one of his fans, the murder victim’s younger daughter notes, were pretty much duds, but whose fatuous sense of mental and verbal superiority remains despite his failures.
Carlin, whose theatrical lineage is among the best in the business, his parents being Thomas Carlin and Frances Sternhagen, his sister Amanda Carlin — looks as if he’s going to do a witty version of the stock intellectual.
But he doesn’t. He employs all the pompous and patronizing traits of the snobbish authority but also has shrewd comic moments when the author has to cover his tracks, stand up to scrutiny, and acknowledge he may not be the cleverest person in the room.
Carlin is particularly good in a scene in which his character figures out how to make the most of a difficult situation.
Allison Scaglietti could have come straight from the silver-tinted screen as the smart, socialite older daughter who learns social graces at a top charm school and uses both her impeccable manners and rich-girl hauteur to make a favorable impression.
Scaglietti makes it clear her character is not to be trifled with and is ready for any game or challenge she may face. She gives the older daughter a Grace Kelly-like charm that shows she is used to commanding but is sweet and natural about it.
Caitlin Kinnunen builds on the younger daughter, another who is helped by Mrs. Peck, already her acquaintance, to develop her better self.
James Taylor Odom is excellent as Mrs. Peck’s son, balancing moments of keen perspicacity and genuine skill with sequences of bumbling and needing his mother’s assistance. Odom makes the Peck lad likeable. You root for him in his own right as well as because he’s the lead character’s son in what is a family story as well as a mystery.
Michael Evan Williams mixes country-club bravado with the unsure vocabulary and manners of the pool boy he actually is, as the older daughter’s fiancé, who may be scheming or not.
The reason I refer to characters so much is George Street not only does not provide a playbill but fails to list the cast or the part they play on the cardboard advertising piece they want you to scan. I disapprove of forgoing programs for incomplete information sheets. It’s bad marketing, false economy, and idiotic as regards doing something positive for the environment.
Robert Kovich’s set is perfect for a Christiesque mystery. It’s sumptuously homey, suggests wealth and a specific period, and gives Raben several spaces to place action.
Molly Walz’ costumes, especially for Scaglietti, Odom, and Carlin, are not the mark. Jose Santiago’s lighting provides mood and atmosphere.
An Old-Fashioned Family Murder, George Street Playhouse, New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, 11 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. Through Sunday, November 2. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. $74 to $130. www.georgestreetplayhouse.org or 732-246-7717.
