Sunday 10/22/2023
Did my usual Sunday morning things. After an early lunch I drove out to Safeway to buy a couple of things, then down to the Mountain View Performing Arts center to see a performance of the play, Mrs. Christie. I did not subscribe to the complete season of TheaterWorks this year because I didn’t find much interest in the plays, including this one which is based on an unhappy period early in Agatha Christie’s life, when her first marriage was breaking up. It is known that at that point she disappeared for a bit more than a week, causing headlines and a search, and then turned up and resumed her life. The play runs two timelines in parallel, with Mrs. Christie interacting with her husband and his lover, simultaneously with a modern-day Christie fan trying to solve the “mystery” of her short disappearance.
Gretta at CHM had recommended it, and she’s an experienced actress and theater-goer so I bought a ticket. I did not like it at all, and I left at half-time. The production generally was polished and professional and the actors were doing their best with what the story gave them, but I couldn’t get into it. Maybe because I read Agatha’s autobiography a decade ago and remember what happens. She doesn’t say anything about her disappearance; but I do remember that afterward she divorced her first husband, got her career together, and later married again and was very happy in that marriage. Her second husband was an archeologist and she spent many happy summers with him on expeditions to Mesopotamia.
So, knowing that about her life, I did not enjoy scenes of domestic unhappiness and stress. I felt kind of “so what, why are we dwelling on this period, she had decades of much happier times later.”
The second plot, about the fan who gets hold of (actually, steals) a couple of pages from an unpublished notebook and wants to work out the mystery of where Agatha went during her disappearance, also didn’t engage me. I think this character, Lucy, was supposed to be funny and quirky, but that didn’t work for me; she just seemed trivial and her search seemed pointless. There were couple of characters introduced as part of the present-day time-line and they were clearly just there for exposition and to give Lucy somebody to talk to.
The whole first act, over an hour, just grated on me for all these reasons. At intermission I headed out to the lobby and asked myself, “Do I want to go back for another hour?” and the answer was a clear “Nunh-unh.” So I came home.
Codgerville 