Collin Doyle and Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Design by Brian Bast, lighting by Ami Farrow, projections by Matt Schuurman. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

The woman we meet in Dead Letter, Conni Massing’s dark and funny, mysterious and moving, new play — premiering at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre with an all-star cast in Heather Inglis’s production — is on a campaign that would make an existentialist blink.

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Amy (Lora Brovold, who’s wonderful) is on a quest for meaning. And she’s hyper-alert to signage from the universe. She’s after reassurance that the losses in this apparently chaotic world, from small to large — missing socks, singleton boots, dead letters and perhaps people — are not random, disconnected, unaccountable. “Bring out your dead,” she commands the dryer in the laundry room, holding aloft a red knee sock that’s her own red flag. And, hey Universe, you do the same.

Lora Brovold in Dead Letter, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

Common sense, plus her patient but increasingly exasperated husband Doug (Brovold’s real-life husband Collin Doyle) and her nosey next-door neighbour Maggie (Maralyn Ryan), call ‘abandon!’ on this obsessiveness. “These things happen,” or “just one of those things,” they caution her, over and over. And in calmer moments Amy, who’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Ask Me About True Crime Podcasts,” acknowledges the vertiginous perch where she’s planted herself, tenaciously holding on, in toe-holds that appear, vanish, and re-appear higher up, with higher stakes.

An orphan sock, she concedes, is a “small and unremarkable” mystery, not the DaVinci Code.” But “for some reason I can’t (pause) let it go,” Amy tells us. “Am I hungry for omens?”

Lora Brovold and Maralyn Ryan in Dead Letter by Conni Massing, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

Well, yes, actually. It’s an appetite fed by recurrences that Doug and Maggie would call coincidence and Amy calls clues. Ground zero: the laundry room. And gradually, in an escalation cunningly charted by Massing’s script and captured in a terrific performance by Brovold, the play becomes a kind of murder mystery investigation — as seen through Amy’s optic and the theatricality of Heather Inglis’s production.

Designed by Brian Bast, Dead Letter unfolds in the round, on a floor covered by Matt Schuurman’s projection-scape of deceased mail, surrounded on all sides by … us. Since mysteries are based on what’s hidden, a production in the round is a bold choice in stagecraft, to be sure. And it turns out to be an exciting one: the characters suddenly appear out of darkness, from four directions, threading their way through us, apparently from among us, to a stage that’s pretty much bare, except for a laundry basket and a rolling cart that stands in for a whole apartment, plus the storage basement and the parkade. When Schuurman’s projections swirl, with atmospheric noir-esque lighting by Ami Farrow, it’s as if the world is revolving, spinning in motion, planting suspicion and flinging off clues as it goes.

In a way, the biggest mystery of all, not least to Amy, is Amy herself. What accounts for her addled desperation, conveyed with such compelling inventiveness by Brovold? The actor  has the tricky double assignment of being the first-person “narrator” of events as they happen, as well as a participant in the scenes? Brovold is more than up to it.

So what’s up with Amy? Amy isn’t sure. The letter that arrives, addressed to a previous tenant who hasn’t lived in Amy and Doug’s apartment for years, ups the ante from orphan socks. So is the moment when our obsessive self-appointed detective inadvertently lets drop a crucial piece of domestic information, and surprises herself with an insight into her own apparently disproportionate behavior. “Is there life after death? Does a fish know it’s in the ocean?”

Brovold, who has impeccable comic timing, is also an actor with a gift for openness. That she’s so readable emotionally is indispensable to the portrait of Amy and the way Dead Letter is built. And Massing’s cunningly structured, emotionally expansive script, a murder mystery that, mysteriously, may or may not be one, gives Brovold and her two stage companions, top-drawer actors both, a playground with the challenge of being convincing, in subtly calibrated ways, and knowing how to withhold information.

Lora Brovold and Maralyn Ryan in Dead Letter by Conni Massing, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

In a murder mystery, Doyle has a crucially natural low-key charm about him as Doug, a small appliance afficionado who is affectionate and reasonable under conditions that are not (to put it evasively) without their mysteries. As Maggie, Ryan, making a welcome return to Edmonton theatre, is disarmingly sweet and “normal,” if a bit vague and loopy, as she arrives at Amy’s door invariably bearing home-made cupcakes or cookies. Are Maggie’s secrets lapses in her faltering memory bank? Gradually, the mystery spreads its web of suspicion to include a cluster of unseen apartment dwellers, all of whom glint with the sinister.

In classic mystery fashion, the more Amy learns, the more she needs to know. Rebecca Merkley’s apt sound score hints at lurking danger that may or not be Amy’s psychological creation, and so do Farrow’s lighting and Schuurman’s projections.

Dead Letter is an involving evening in the theatre, a surprising tale of innocuous small-scale comic obsession that darkens to become a murder mystery and a domestic struggle about trust. There is fun to be had, and a place in it for heartbreak, too. One of Massing’s best.

REVIEW

Dead Letter

Theatre: Workshop West Playwright’s Theatre

Written by: Conni Massing

Directed by: Heather Inglis

Starring: Lora Brovold, Collin Doyle, Maralyn Ryan

Where: The Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: through June 2

Tickets: workshopwest.org