Agatha Crusty and the Murder Mystery Dinner

by Derek Webb

Oct. 23 - Nov. 14, 2015

Geoffrey and Caroline Robertson are having a dinner party to celebrate ten successful years of Mighty Midget Vacuum Cleaners, the company he jointly owns with Tim McArthur, and to add spice to the evening they decide to make it a murder mystery dinner. They are joined by a variety of employees and their partners. And Geoffrey has a special surprise – he has invited the well-known crime novelist Agatha Crusty (pronounced Croosty) to join them. She is in the area promoting her latest book and agrees to be guest of honour.
But on the evening of the dinner, their remote Victorian house finds itself in the centre of a storm so bad that the river floods and they are cut off. Worse, the power fails and in the darkness one of the guests is murdered. But since everybody else was together when the murder was committed, they are as perplexed as they are worried. And when another murder happens in the same way it is no laughing matter… except this is an Agatha Crusty murder mystery so there are laughs a-plenty. And also a genuine mystery that will keep an audience guessing as well as laughing.

Cahoots

by Rick Johnston

Comedy

May 27- June 18, 2016

The setting is Ken and Jan's apartment in a Manhattan high rise, where Jan and her friend Lois are setting up for a dinner party before attending a block association meeting on neighborhood crime—a subject that has become an obsession with Lois' husband, Al. In fact, just to show how vulnerable they all are, Al, impersonating a masked burglar, breaks into the apartment via the terrace while the ladies cower in fear. For this, and other offenses, there is a growing antagonism between Al and Ken, and as dinner progresses so do the insults—culminating in disaster when Ken fatally clobbers Al with an oversized pepper mill. The problem then becomes what to do with the body, a dilemma which is compounded when a suspicious security guard arrives at the door and, being bent on blackmail, is also summarily dispatched. Before the evening is over our concerned citizens find themselves turned into expert, if accidental, criminals, as one of their victims is killed twice and several bodies are deftly disposed of from the terrace. Filled with witty dialogue and hilarious one-liners, the play manages to maintain a farcical unreality while demonstrating that things usually do get worse before they get better—and that the vaunted dangers of street crime can pale beside the outrageous mayhem that can ensue when four "good friends" get together for a quiet dinner.