Agatha Christie wraps up Acadia Rep season

Is there any playwright more beloved by summer stock companies and vacationing audiences than Agatha Christie? Murderers, suspects, lawyers, aristocrats and secret-holders – many with British accents – are the very stuff of warm-weather entertainment. Her plays have become the signature August offering and specialty at Acadia Repertory Theatre in Somesville, where the annual Dame Christie show is among the most popular events of the summer.

As its final production of the season, Acadia Rep has mounted a lively version of “Go Back for Murder,” Christie’s episodic comedy about a woman determined to find out the truth about her father’s murder and the charge that her mother administered the poison. It may be one of Christie’s most connect-the-dots plots, but Acadia Rep, with a run through Aug. 29, works hard at bringing the static script to life.

Director Ken Stack, master of the murder mystery, has designed a mini, multitasking version of his traditional English manor house set for this show. At center stage, a mobile structure turns to accommodate the five scenes in Act I – a lawyer’s office, city office, hotel room, sitting room and restaurant. At each location, Carla LeMarchant interviews the five people who were at the scene of her father’s death some 16 years earlier.

It’s a tight performance space, but Stack takes a big breath in the final act and opens the action to a house in the west of England, and it’s a visual relief.

From the start, this flashback mystery, based on Christie’s novel “Murder in Retrospect,” has an expository thud to it. But Stack knows his Christie – and he knows this play, which he also produced in 1993. (Acadia Rep is so devoted to the genre that it has repeated several of Christie’s works over the years.) Stack gives the action the swift momentum of a bouncing ball. As Carla interviews each suspect, the plot, as they say, thickens, and the cast gamely prepares the audience for the finale, in which the murder scene is re-enacted.

Jenny O’Sullivan’s Carla works out her curiosity with great wonder and slyness. The show depends on her vitality and, mostly, she meets that challenge doubling as Carla and as Caroline, her mother, in the final act. The other cast members – Matthew McDonald, Paul Jerue, Darci K. Smith, Phil Fox, Kimberly Forbes, Liz Nichols and John Geoffrion – help create an atmosphere of mystery and entertainment.

The two standout performances are given by Peter Stray, who navigates his role as the accused mother’s trial lawyer with swift intelligence, and Stack, whose presence is nearly essential to the spirit of a Christie show at Acadia Rep. Any scene with Stray has the witty charm and quirky high-mindedness of a comic murder mystery. And Stack, who shows up for only one scene, plays Carla’s obnoxious Canadian boyfriend with a distinctly American bluster. He’s like a snare drum, loud, alarming and delightful.

Whodunit? Ah, there’s the rub. It’s the right time of the year for this kind of silly diversion. So take advantage of the fun – and the fog, an element the Dame herself would have appreciated, and even ordered up for the game.

Acadia Repertory Theatre will present Agatha Christie’s “Go Back for Murder” through Aug. 29 at the Masonic Hall in Somesville. For information, call 244-7260 or visit www.acadiarep.com. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.