Sock & Buskin’s The Will to Kill was a new one for my partner and I, because we had never attended one of the company’s murder mystery parties before. Part performance, part cocktail party, part whodunit, the murder mystery party is an interesting, interactive, hybrid genre. Unlike most theatre, the majority of the action is carried out between “audience members” and the performers, rather than amongst performers themselves.

The premise of The Will to Kill is that we’re attending the will reading of Edmund Carroll Warren, a real estate baron who amassed a huge fortune while alienating his sister, his three children, their spouses, and (to a certain extent) his corporate subordinates. The only person Edmund actually liked was his adopted nephew Alistair. In the opening portion of the performance, we just milled around and interacted with the actors, finding out who they are, their relationship with and view of Edmund, and what they hope to get from his will. Then in the middle section, we gathered around a TV screen to watch Edmund’s video reading of his will—in which he left everything to Alistair, cutting his children and sister out completely. However, Alistair wouldn’t inherit until his thirtieth birthday, which is tomorrow. This is an important detail when Alistair’s body is found stabbed to death. The final portion of the even consisted of Inspector Perrier (a French police officer in an exchange program with the Bellefonte, PA police) arriving and deputizing everyone in the room to interrogate suspects. We had to try and figure out who the murderer was by asking questions and examining a few pieces of evidence. Finally, in the dramatic climax, Inspector Perrier did your standard detective story technique of going through and explaining who wasn’t the killer and how we knew, and only then revealing who the real murderer was.

In a sense, I was not a particularly good guest for this party, because I basically started from the perspective that I was just going to fuck with everybody—which ended up being hilarious for my partner and the couple sitting near us, but I think was a mixed bag for the actors. Some, like Gregg Baptista (playing Edmund’s son Reggie, the libertine poet) and Lilli Falcon (playing the lawyer who ran the will reading), really seemed to enjoy seeing what kind of insanity I could come up with. They both came back over to where we were repeatedly. In fact, Lilli was the only one who actually questioned my claims about storming the beaches of Normandy with Edmund. She pointed out that he was born in 1949, so he would have been negative four when WWII ended (in fairness, I was born in 1987, but no one pointed that out). Everyone else, in true improv fashion, went along with my claims and just accepted that it was part of Edmund’s history. By contrast, I think I irritated some of the performers, like when I accused Inspector Perrier of not really being a French police officer, but instead being Alistair in disguise (Kyle Stanley played both Alistair and Perrier, the later with a trilby hat, fake mustache, and French accent). But my arguments weren’t based on the actor being the same person, but on Bellefonte not having a police sergeant—the person Perrier claimed had sent him over—and that Bellefonte’s police exchange program was with Helsinki, Finland, not with France. I got the sense that Kyle didn’t really know what to make of this line of inquiry (sorry, Kyle). There were also several times when actors turned to everyone else in the group sitting with me and specifically asked if any of them had questions.