DOING AGATHA GETTING DONE

NOT WAITING FOR GUFFMAN

ANY FILM COMEDY about community theatre begs comparison to “Waiting for Guffman,” but our story is nothing like it. In fact, we feel our comedy is closer to the community theatre experience, no matter how farfetched it might seem. Most of our plot devices are drawn from life. We know of actors who have left the stage suddenly to go to the bathroom, or even to go home; we have known compulsive improvisors, and others who rely on strange and elaborate memory aids. Stranger still is the common tendency of community theatres to put on Agatha Christie while stripping her of everything that seemed to make her appealing in the first place: style, time, place, and even English accents. Taken to extremes, a badly done mystery play can transcend its genre and become something like absurdist theatre, where fingerprints are recovered from a window that has no glass, and a ballistic report is made on a gun that never left the Inspector’s pocket.

Of course, community theatre offers an easy target for ridicule. That is not our aim. Our story is really about acting and identity, how actors tend to meld with their characters, and how they struggle against the many obstacles they place in their own way. Our characters don’t dream of stardom, they are at war with each other as they try to hold their house of cards together, and they join forces in ingenious ways to see the production through.

We are fortunate to have assembled an extraordinary ensemble of actors. We obtained a SAG Experimental Film Agreement in order to use professional actors in some of the leading roles. Some of our cast are professional; almost all are community theatre veterans who identified with the plot elements in the story. We are especially pleased and fortunate to have professional actor and playwright Doug Taylor in our cast, playing the role of the morose, alcoholic founder of the Firetrap Theatre (see the article, next page).

THE CAST

Laura Wainwright ANN KINNER

Malcolm MIKE L. STANLEY

John Tamberlain ALEXANDER KULCSAR

Billy Yokum KEVIN MOORE

Benny LEIGH V. GRISWOLD

Mitch DOUG MacHUGH

Clotilde Markham MARGUERITE FOSTER

Arden Sherwood DOUG TAYLOR

Rip Kosinski PAT LEO

Mrs. Warwick RUTHANNE BAUMGARTNER

Daryl DARYL HOWELL

Angell AARON KAPLAN

Major Julian Farrar MICHAEL STANLEY

Ashley ELISE BOCHINSKI

The Inspector DAMIEN LANGAN

Sgt. Cadwallader BOB JURGENS

Agatha MOLLIE OLIVER

Widescreen MARK MANDELLO

Detective Kosinski LELAND WILLIAMS

News Anchor PEGGY NELSON

Reporter Liz Barrett LESLIE VAN ETTEN BROATCH

Reporter TOM HOLEHAN

Gemma Whitmore DAVINA PORTER

Joe Connelly BOB LASPROGATO

Martha GLENNA KEAN

Felicity MARY POILE

Ethel ETHYLE POWER

Donna Denby ROSANNE NELSON

Cecil Bordeaux ROB PAWLIKOWSKI

Jake Trapper PETER WOOD

Adult Film Star DANIELLE SULTINI

Zoltan / Hercule Poirot TOM PETRONE

Man at the Bar GEORGE LANG

Woman at the Bar JOANNE STANLEY

Woman at the Party MARY KULCSAR

more to follow

BEFORE we had even started production on Doing Agatha, a high school student interviewed Mike Stanley and me on video for her drama class (like Malcolm, a character in our film). We explained the concept, the size and budget of the project, the production plan, the post production plan and the time frame. She politely let us go on at length, then when she felt she had enough, she switched off the camera and said bluntly, “I don’t see how you guys are going to pull this off.” This was, of course, unsettling. If a kid could see the folly of what we were proposing, what was wrong with us? But that is exactly the kind of question you have to avoid if you are going to attempt Doing Agatha. You need the courage that only extreme self delusion can give you. Let the dilletante kids write the short films they can shoot and edit in an evening and win jury prizes at Sundance. They will grow up to think filmmaking is easy. Where are their scars, the red badges Stephen Crane wrote of, the sleepless nights, or nights in the hospital? They don’t teach kids that a bridge too far is the only kind worth crossing. Anyhow, the girl had not, like Mike and me, spent time doing things equally stupid on a lesser scale, constructing sets for community and professional stages, toiling in the dead of night in abandoned warehouses with rats and raccoons, racing against load-in deadlines, doing the impossible. She had not built a Model T as a stage prop for the hell of it (literally). She did not appreciate that what seemed most ridiculous to her was probably what most appealed to us. In short, yes, we were crazy. And at that moment, we had the time, the money, and the opportunity. A perfect storm.

Three years later, we are still in it. We have now been in this movie longer than Bush has been in Iraq. But the end is in sight. And whatever happens to Agatha in the end, we know that what we have on film is an engaging story and some amazing performances by an ensemble of actors who were crazy enough to take the journey with us, and scenes that are still funny, even after watching them hundreds of times in the editing process. We look forward to sharing them with you.

Watch this space for news about screenings this year.

Alexander Kulcsar

Writer, Producer