Special promotional content provided by Forward Theater Company.
By Mike Fischer
Late in Heidi Armbruster’s “Murder Girl,” the wickedly good whodunit receiving its world premiere through Forward Theater’s next production, a 30-something named LeeAnn marvels at how easily gossips turn “shreds of nothing . . . into the worst case scenario,” as they jump to wrong conclusions on the basis of limited information.
LeeAnn isn’t describing the 2024 election, but she is talking about the way we live now, in a world where we’re flooded with more information than we’ve ever had and yet paradoxically know increasingly less about neighbors who’ve become strangers and communities mired in crisis.
Little wonder that in the introductory remarks to the “Murder Girl” script, Armbruster notes that her “characters rarely speak the plain whole truth,” adding that “the play relies on misunderstanding.”
Such misdirection is fuel for Armbruster’s loopy comedy – few murder mysteries are this funny – as her wannabe detectives bumble their way toward truth in a remote northern Wisconsin supper club. But there’s pathos aplenty lurking just beneath the punchlines, as we watch these lonely souls measure what they’ve lost because they don’t know how to talk to each other.
In Christie’s Shadow
When the dream of a common language dies, both biological and chosen families atrophy.
Armbruster’s characters talk a lot about how the crew that works at Marty’s – the twins who’ve inherited it as well as the cook and three female servers, two of them named Charlotte – are family. If so, this family is as dysfunctional as they come.
Not only do they constantly bicker and fight. They’re also shot through with petty jealousies and ancient resentments, unfounded assumptions and unacknowledged griefs. They’re all convinced that one of their number killed the missing and presumably murdered girl around whom the plot revolves. And they’re more than willing to point fingers at each other.
In short, they behave a lot like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, where an ostensibly comfy communal gathering reliably devolves into a terrifying Hobbesian world of distrust and fear.
Christie’s novels and plays nearly always feature a world where characters who pine for community lament how little they now know of each other; as one character in “The Mousetrap” says in the early going, “you never really know what anyone is like – or what they are thinking.”
Such a world resembles our own, in which we often feel isolated despite our unparalleled virtual connections.
It’s no coincidence that Armbruster is a self-professed Christie fan; she’s even written a play, “Mrs. Christie,” connecting the famed author’s 11-day disappearance in 1926 to the death of Christie’s mother earlier that year.
Grief haunts “Murder Girl” as well.
It’s entangled with conflicted relations between mothers and daughters; shame regarding past mistakes; bewilderment about how to fix them; nostalgia for a vanished world; and alienation from the one that’s replaced it. “This place holds onto that kind of thing,” one character says of Marty’s. “The walls here suck it up.”
Attuned to her characters’ unacknowledged secrets and damaged inner lives, Armbruster offers far more than a plot-propelled drive toward the next narrative surprise. At its core, “Murder Girl” is actually the story of people engaged in a genuine process of self-discovery – and a reminder that such epiphanies rely on others as lucid reflectors helping us better see ourselves.
Changing the Narrative
Peering into the mirrors our friends and family hold up to us can confirm how much we have in common. But it can also encourage us to lose ourselves in our reflections, while ignoring those who make them possible.
Not for nothing is “Murder Girl” rife with mirroring doubles: Twins. Two characters named Charlotte. Two mother-daughter pairs, following similar trajectories involving a daughter who wants to leave and a mother who can’t let her go.
We can learn from such similarities or, as is often the case in “Murder Girl,” we can ignore them, defining ourselves by how we’re different rather than focusing on all we share and all that History might teach us.
“What story are you guys gonna tell?,” asks the play’s most grounded character. “And what do you want the rest of us to say?”
Will we take the worst possible view of each other, assuming we inhabit a dystopian world in which we’re all primarily out for ourselves? Will we live our lives seeing through a glass darkly, as we hold up and peer through mirrors clouded by suspicion and mistrust? Will we, as one character here says of the others, constantly talk past each other without really saying anything?
Or might we write a new script, in which tragedy’s destruction and death yields to comedy’s love and understanding? Might a murder mystery play as a comedy? Might “Murder Girl” fly free of prescribed genre boundaries, delivering inspiration and hope along with murder and mayhem?
One thing’s for sure: If we’re going to move from darkness to dawn, “we’re gonna have to talk,” as one of Armbruster’s characters insists those around him do. “Let’s start,” he adds, “with each other.”
Did I mention that the first scene in “Murder Girl” takes place on the winter solstice, or that many of the ensuing scenes unfold in the dark as the snow flies and the winds howl? Will its characters find their way to the light before it flickers out? Can we?
You’ll need to come see “Murder Girl” for Armbruster’s answers to such questions; how we answer them for ourselves will be up to us. But as Forward consistently demonstrates, theater can help us solve such big mysteries, allowing us to better live with and more fully love each other. That magic is the greatest mystery of all.
“Murder Girl” runs in the Playhouse at Overture Center from November 7-24. For more information regarding and tickets, visit https://forwardtheater.com/show/murder-girl/.