Lawson Taitte

Anthony Shaffer invented the perversely convoluted stage mystery with his perennial hit Sleuth. He did his best to sink the new genre when he then wrote Whodunnit.

The production of the latter that Theatre Three opened on Monday only compounds its problems.

I'm not sure whether you should call it a spoiler alert when there is so little of import to spoil, but it's impossible to discuss the interpretation without giving away a good deal of the plot. In Whodunnit a mysterious voice immediately tells us that we are about to see one of those classic English mysteries in which six people, plus a butler, are stranded in a country house when a murder takes place. Since there's no one else around, one of the characters must be the culprit.

Indeed, Silas Bazeby (Kevin Scott Keating) is hosting a house party where all the guests his absent wife has invited are strangers to him. The loathsome blackmailer Andreas Capodistriou (Bob Hess) accosts each new arrival with a threat to reveal some secret misdeed from the past.

It's all so tediously retro that we are more than prepared for a revelation that something else is really going on here. When it comes out early in the second act that every character we've seen is actually an actor hired to participate in one of those mystery weekends, it's not all that big a surprise.

Director Kerry Cole has made things much worse than they had to be, though, because she has allowed her actors to pretend to be such bad actors during that long first act. Bad wigs, silly walks and poor line readings for the best part of an hour are enough to make everyone want to go home at intermission.

The performances get better after what the British call the interval – but the play doesn't. Where everything is so obviously artifice there's not much reason to care about the people, and the mystery's solution relies so heavily on those irritating voice-overs that the plot feels phony, too.

The one good thing about Whodunnit is the eventual revelation that good actors like Terry McCracken, Mark Shum and Carrie Bourn have been so bad for so long on purpose. The poor things.

PLAN YOUR LIFE Through May 4 at Theatre Three. Runs 140 mins. $10 to $40. 214-871-3300, www.theatre3dallas.com.

ARCHIVES: Search for more stories on this and other topics | Search Tips

SUBSCRIBE: Get The Dallas Morning News delivered to your home