Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet, and Colonel Mustard are making their way to the Community Arts Workshop (CAW) this season, not for board games but to tread the boards for a new comedy called WHODUNIT?, an original production by Kerfuffle Theatre.
“It’s basically taking all the tropes and stereotypes of Agatha Christie mashed up with Clue the board game, mashed up with all those PBS dramas we have,” said artistic director E-J Huerta, who wrote and is directing the play. “It’s a young, earnest English couple, Nigel and Caroline Plum. He’s Professor Plum. In fact, they live at Mediocre Manor, and it’s Christmas, so they’re having a few friends and relatives over for the holidays, but they get snowed in. What could go wrong?”
Huerta — who is British and produces theater in London and Edinburgh as well as Santa Barbara — set the show in England in Christmas of 1945, which is the first Christmas since the end of the war. “As the British always call it the war, we mean World War II,” she explained.
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While the show definitely leans toward the silly side, there are also some more serious undercurrents. “We’re really making a lot of parodies of the way they were, the sexism of the time, the overt xenophobia and the snobbery and also kind of parodying the way you have the Agatha Christie heroines like Miss Marple types who solve everything so easily, so ridiculously,” Huerta said.
As with last year’s holiday production of PETER SPAM, the cast features performers with a wide range of ages and acting experience. Huerta ran the Upstarts Youth Theatre group in town for many years, and one of her actors from those days, Emma Tracewell, now in her early twenties, is back and starring in WHODUNIT? as Caroline Plum. “It’s just a joy to work with her again,” said Huerta of the full-circle moment. Also in the cast are Ali Javanbakht, Chief Medical Officer for Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinics; longtime local radio personality Jim Sirianni; Emily Vallance; Clayton Barry; Sanford Jackson; and David “Rosie” Rosenholz.
Taking place during the “supposedly dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s” (last year’s similarly silly show sold out during the same time period), WHODUNIT? has a limited engagement at the Community Arts Workshop. Huerta is dedicating the show to the memory of Kenji Fukudome, a longtime supporter and photographer for Kerfuffle Theatre who recently passed away.
WHODUNIT? shows at the CAW (631 Garden St.), December 28-31. See bit.ly/3KHLIoe for tickets and more information.
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