MARCH 2, 2017 // 9
Continued from Pg. 8
Opening the season is Agatha Christie’s
“The Mousetrap,” which first opened in Lon-
don in 1952 and has run almost continuously
since then. The play will run at the Coaster
through April 15.
Lon time North Coast director Susi Brown
attributes the play’s popularity to its play-
wright. Agatha Christie, said Brown, created
characters who are familiar to her audiences.
“People can see themselves in her plays or
in her books,” Brown said. “She’s quite the
trickster, and people like to be surprised.”
In “The Mousetrap,” a group of strangers
is stranded in a guest house run by newly
married couple. When a murder occurs,
suspicion is cast on everyone there: a spinster
with a curious background, an architect who
enjoys cooking, a cranky jurist, a retired
army major and an uninvited guest whose car
overturned in a snow storm. It’s up to a police
sergeant, who skis to the manor, to find the
killer who whistles “Three Blind Mice.”
Since she was asked to direct the play,
Brown has been sleuthing for clues her-
self, cleverly played out in Christie’s script
through the actors’ movements and dialogue.
It has been fun, she said. “I like mysteries.”
A frequent director at the former River
Theater and owner of the former Pier Pres-
sure Productions in Astoria, Brown approach-
es the play academically, probably due to 27
years of teaching literature, theater, speech,
dance and art in the Knappa School District.
She also has a master’s of fine arts degree in
theater direction.
She read the play at least five times and
wrote notes on it before casting it. She also
consulted a stack of books about “The
Mousetrap” and Agatha Christie.
Although she directed the play at Knappa
SUBMITTED PHOTO BY GEORGE VETTER/CANNON-BEACH.NET
As with any murder mystery, everyone in “The Mousetrap” has a secret, and Detective Sergeant
Trotter is trying to determine what those secrets are. From left, are Mrs. Boyle (Toni Ihander),
Mollie Ralston (Emily Dante), Trotter (David Sweeney), Mr. Paravicini (Don Conner), Giles Ralston
(William Ham), Miss Casewell (Heather Neuwirth), Major Metcalf (Frank Jagodnik) and Christo-
pher Wren (Tim Garvin). Not pictured is Richard Bowman, who also plays Christopher Wren.
High School and saw performances of it in
London and again in Astoria, Brown still
had “tons of questions” about Christie’s
intention. “There were a lot of details,”
Brown said. “I had to ask, ‘Why is that
happening?’”
While she prepares herself thoroughly
as a director, Brown still wants her cast to
bring their own insight into the characters
they play. Her cast includes actors ranging
from Nehalem to Washington’s Long Beach
Peninsula. All have appeared on the Coaster
stage before.
Uppermost in her mind is maintaining
the surprise for the audience. To do that, the
actors must get “underneath” their charac-
ters’ multi-dimensional personalities so their
responses to each other are natural onstage
and contribute to the story being told, Brown
said. The audience, then, can enjoy picking
up clues of its own.
If an actor is confused about some
dialogue or movement, Brown will discuss
with him or her the character’s “back story.”
Sometimes she needs to tell a brief bit of his-
tory about mid-century England or talk about
some aspect of British culture. At other times,
she provides some vocal techniques for those
doing British or Italian accents.
The cast members — both the seasoned
and those who are less experienced — have
absorbed the personalities Christie developed.
They will keep the audience interested — and
guessing — until the big reveal, Brown said.
“I just feel like a person who inherited
a beautiful crystal bowl of candy with this
cast,” she said. “This has been a real treat.”
Christie’s play is more than a mystery,
Brown said. It’s also a description about what
it was like to resume life after World War II.
“Food was still being rationed. People
were going through a very hard time,” she
said. “What happened to people who had
hopes and dreams?”
Mollie and Giles Ralston (played by
Emily Dante and William Ham), married only
a year, represent the young generation facing
an optimistic future, who experience the
“relief of coming out of the war and possibly
feeling giddy, asking themselves, ‘What are
we going to do now?’”
They also represent a change in a culture
where hasty war marriages were made with-
out parental vetting or consent. “What once
was is no longer,” Brown said.
Brown literally wears the play on her
collar at every rehearsal: She attaches three
mouse pins on her jacket or blouse. Her
mother also collected mouse pins.
“I think I have, at present count, probably
12 different sets of three mice,” Brown said,
checking out a cute wooden mouse pin with
green ears and a long leather tail. If she for-
gets to adorn her jacket, there’s a mouse pin
on her rehearsal bag.
“I would be completely unnerved if I
showed up one day without a mouse,” Brown
said.
CHECK
IT OUT
PHOTO BY NANCY MCCARTHY
SUBMITTED PHOTO BY GEORGE VETTER/CANNON-BEACH.NET
William Ham as Giles Ralston, Emily Dante as Mollie Ralston, David Sweeney as
Detective Sergeant Trotter in “The Mousetrap.”
Heather Neuwirth, as Miss Casewell, dances to the “Flight of
the Bumblebee,” to annoy the cranky Mrs. Boyle, played by
Toni Ihander in the murder mystery “The Mousetrap,” open-
ing March 3 at the Coaster Theatre in Cannon Beach.
What: The Mousetrap, opening
the 45th anniversary of the Coaster
Theatre Playhouse
Where: Coaster Theatre Playhouse,
108 N. Hemlock St., Cannon Beach
When: 7:30 p.m. March 3 to April 15;
Sunday matinees are 3 p.m. March
12, 26 and April 2
Who: Directed by Susi Brown and
performed by: David Sweeney, Emi-
ly Dante, William Ham, Toni Ihander,
Frank Jagodnik, Heather Neuwirth
and Donald Conner. Richard Bow-
man and Tim Garvin share a role.