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Villa Thrilla
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Atwater Village Theatre
Through Nov. 23
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where or when Villa Thrilla playwright Anna Nicholas’s bewildering parody of an immersive murder-mystery thriller begins to go off the rails. An educated guess would be around the time the author decided that her problem-plagued script was stage-ready.
A program note explains that Nicholas’s intention was to write for the audience-interactive mystery genre the equivalent of what Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is to farce — both a scrupulously faithful homage and an uproarious deconstruction.
Unfortunately, Villa Thrilla is neither. Which is to say, apart from set designer Madison Rhoades’s estimable drawing-room nod to a Mousetrap-like West End chestnut, there is very little in either the text or director Gary Lee Reed’s polished production (featuring Adriana Lambarri’s witty costumes and Brandon Baruch’s expert lights) that strikes the requisite note of genre familiarity, or even recognizably evokes any of the obligatory plot-torquing mechanics that might then have been successfully subverted to dramatic-ironic effect.
The plot, such as it is, involves a Tony Soprano-esque New Jersey mobster (Brad Lee Wind in a broad but spot-on impersonation) and his slow-witted girlfriend (Danya LaBelle) arriving incognito at an audience-immersive mystery for a secret meeting with a former rival that has long ago disappeared into witness protection.
Act I is entirely taken up with overly belabored exposition as both the real mystery and the fictive mystery and its actor-characters are tediously introduced. Among the standouts are Erica Hanrahan-Ball, who is effective as a monosyllabic American blonde bimbo eventually unmasked as a British stage diva, while Andrew Villarreal adroitly transitions from a flamboyantly mincing Hispanic house boy to a merely run-of-the-mill gay actor. The remainder of the ensemble proves equally capable in performances that are just as wasted.
By the time that Nicholas’s tongue-in-cheek but unfunny plot convolutions do finally emerge in Act 2, the play’s underdeveloped narrative threads have become so hopelessly tangled that, by the final curtain, it almost goes unnoticed that Villa Thrilla is a whodunit in which nobody has actually done anything illicit at all. And that may be the only authentic crime represented during the evening.
Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Nov. 23. (800) 838-3006, villathrilla.com.
