The Turning Bookcase

Tessa had the tickets, so Tessa chose the evening: The Blackwood Letter, a crime mystery by the Corner Street Players, seven-thirty on a Friday, in the basement of a church on Delancey Street.

I want to be fair about this, because these are people with day jobs who learn their lines after dinner. The set was genuinely creative. Somebody had built a bookcase that turned on a metal pole, so the study became the garden shed and then the study again, and it worked perfectly every time except the last one. That is better than most professional theater I have paid for.

The acting was the problem. The detective delivered every line at the same speed and the same volume, including “she's dead.” The housekeeper checked the audience before each entrance, as if she wanted to be sure we were still there. And the man playing the criminal held the paper knife in scene one the way you hold something you are trying not to think about, then looked at it twice more before the interval. A turning bookcase can do a lot, but it can't effectively cover for a cast that gives the ending away in eleven minutes.

At the interval Tessa wrote a name on her program and slid it across to me. She was right. So was the row behind us, who had been whispering the same name since scene two.

“Don't review it in your head, Nils,” she said. “It's forty people and a bookcase.”

But here is the thing: it was a disappointing evening and not a boring one, and those are different animals. In the final scene the bookcase stuck. The garden shed refused to arrive. The detective kept talking to a wall for about four seconds, and then a hand came out from behind the bookcase, a real hand, belonging to a real person in a black hoodie, and pushed.

Two hundred people made a sound they hadn't made all night. Whatever the Corner Street Players had planned for that evening, the arm was the one thing that truly managed to entertain us, and I would pay eleven dollars to see it again.