Courting

Joyce and I went to court last night.

No, there was no lawsuit--no divorce. (Whew!) It was a production of Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution mounted by the Great Lakes Theater at the Hanna Theater in downtown Cleveland.

Joyce and I have been subscribers to the GLT (which has had several names, including the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (they still do two Shakespeare plays a year) and the Great Lakes Theater Festival). And so we always recognize some of the principal players--as we did last night.

One problem: I remembered the plot twist, something I'd learned from that old (1957) film with Charles Laughton. (Link to some video of that film.) Joyce did not, and I offered her a deal: $20 and I'd keep my mouth shut. She thought that was amusing, but I was serious. (Not really.) Anyway, I remembered seeing that film at the old Hiram College Sunday Night Movie on June 15,1958. I was thirteen. And the ending shocked me. (As it shocked Joyce last night.)

The story involves a murder case (it is Agatha Christie, after all!). A young man has befriended a (wealthy) older woman (she's in her 50s!), who changes her will to benefit him. Then someone murders the woman; the young man goes to the police, tells what he knows. Then he's accused of the murder.

He finds a defense attorney (Charles Laughton in the film), and the case unwinds right in front of us.

By the way, the video I linked above shows that the GLT reproduced the film's look of the courtroom--a replica.

Downstage is the attorney's office, where more than a little of the action takes place.

The principal performers were very good--esp. the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the judge (who provided some comic relief--at one point he says he doesn't know what a "cat brush" is), the accused, and the "wife" of the accused. These parts were played, respectively, by Aled Davies (a GLT veteran), Nick Steen, David Anthony Smith (another veteran), Taha Mandviwala, and Jodi Dominick. I put quotation marks around wife because ... ah, ain't gonna tell you!

The audience--pretty much a full house--seemed to love it (as the Standing O at the end might confirm--though Standing O's are far more commonplace these days than they used to be).

I noticed some wee "holes" in the plot this time (one involved the blood types of the victim and the accused), but let's not get too picky.

I will get picky about the drive home. On I-480, near an on-ramp (I was in the right lane on the freeway), an entering, impatient driver roared by me on the right berm, doing about 80. My heart asked me if I wanted to go on living; I said I did. Okay, said my heart, just this one time ...

Anyway, lots of fun last night, watching with Joyce (and watching Joyce!), remembering the myriads of plays we have seen together--on Playhouse Square and at many other venues. One of my life's great privileges ...

And next month at the GLT? The Taming of the Shrew, a play I taught to my 8th graders for quite a few years at Harmon (Middle) School back in the late 80s, early 90s. And, as Fate smiles somewhere, the word-of-the-day calendar says that today's word is froward, a word I learned from a speech in Shrew, Kate's famous (long) advice to women at the end: And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour .... (5.2).