LITTLE ROCK — Unless it’s a world premiere, it’s pretty unusual around here to have a playwright show up to check out a production of his work.
Especially when that playwright travels to Arkansas from York.
Not New York - York. The old one. In England.
Playwright Peter Gordon dropped in last week on Murry’s Dinner Playhouse, which is currently staging Gordon’s Death by Fatal Murder, the third installment in a trilogy of comedy murder mysteries featuring inept British detective Inspector Pratt. The show will be on stage through Nov. 14.
“They’ve started to take off,” Gordon says. “There have been about a dozen community theater productions. A dinner theater in Louisville (Ky.) has done the first two, and will do this one next year. This is the second one that Murry’s has done.”
“The show was great,” he adds after sitting through a Tuesday-night performance. “I really enjoyed it. I thought that the cast did really well, with good consistent accents. It all seemed to work very well with the audience, who seemed to enjoy the blend of whodunit and comedy.”
The Little Rock dinner theater also produced Murdered to Death, the first play in the trilogy, in October 2009, but an Oct. 29 flash flood at the theater at Colonel Glenn Road and University Avenue cut the run short.
The cast and staff had to stop the show at intermission and evacuate patrons before raging water swamped the parking lot. Water eventually seeped into the front and back of the building, making it unusable for more than two weeks.
Murry’s director-actor Glen Gilbert originally considered the second play in the trilogy, Secondary Cause of Death, for what is traditionally the “October murder mystery” slot in this year’s dinner theater schedule, but deferred to the third, citing the technical difficulties of staging it (including a number of explosions that would be hard to pull off in Murry’s confines).
Gordon wasn’t exactly making a special trip just to see the Murry’s show. He’s on a sort of U.S. tour with his wife, Janice, that started in Chicago, where he also got to see his work on a couple of stages, and continues with a trip to North Carolina to see friends. They’ll also stop in Washington and New York, where he’ll hold talks with officials at DramatistsPlay Service, which markets his Pratt plays in this country, before sailing back to England on the Queen Mary 2.
Gordon turned what had started as a courtesy note from Gilbert last fall into a running correspondence by mail and e-mail.
“This is my second visit to the States,” he says. “I’m glad to see good quality productions, and how American audiences react. There’s a huge potential in some of these characters.”
The plays are set in the 1930s; Gordon’s Inspector Pratt is a bumbler and malapropper who nonetheless manages eventually to stumble across the solution to the murder he’s investigating. “The Pratt trilogy is like The Pink Panther meets Britain,” or, he acknowledges, Inspector Clouseau, the “hero” of the Pink Panther films, meets Agatha Christie.
“It has been a surprise that the Pratt plays have been received so well in the U.S.,” Gordon says. “It’s always a question whether English humor translates. There are terms and expressions that Americans don’t get.”
For example, he admits, the name “Pratt” would be immediately and recognizably funny to Brits, but might not mean anything to audiences on this side of the pond. (“Prat” is a commonly-used synonym for “idiot,” derived from a slang term for the posterior that survives in American English in the term “pratfall.”)
Gordon offsets that with plenty of, well, pratfalls. “There’s as much physical comedy as you like,” he says.
“When you’re writing a play, you have a vision of the character, but in the hands of different actors and directors, that character can be played in lots of different ways, and it still works.”
Gordon’s 11-play output consists of 10 comedies (one is a one-act) and a psychological thriller called Wild Card. His latest, Par for the Course, focuses on a certain semi-popular sport, though, he notes, “the humor is more about people than golf.”
Despite their popularity in his native England and the United States, “the three Pratt plays are not typical of the stuff I write,” Gordon says. “the others are more modern comedies,” along the lines of the dry comedies produced by Alan Ayckbourn, whom Gordon acknowledges as an influence (along with John Cleese of Monty Python).
Before he became a playwright, Gordon, who turned 60 this year, was a civil engineer, and “a specialist in the area of water and sewage systems.” So he may be able to give the folks at Murry’s a few pointers on avoiding any more floods.
Style, Pages 34 on 10/26/2010