The play, ‘Murder Mystery, Mystery Murder,’ will feature 21 drama students
PASO ROBLES — The Paso Robles High drama department will be debuting a brand new play, specially written for them by local playwright Ben Abbott. The show, “Murder Mystery, Mystery Murder,” will highlight drama teacher and the show’s director Marcy Keyser-Goodnow’s full cast of 21 students. Keyser-Goodnow and Abbott met each other because their kids were bearkittens together, and now, Abbott is a substitute teacher at Paso Robles High School (PRHS).
“Here’s how this happened,” stated Abbott of writing the play. “I was around here because of substitute teaching, because I know Marcy, and Marcy was complaining about the plays that are available for high school students and the frustrations that she had with they’re not quite what she wants, and I offered, ‘I’ll write one for you.'”
Abbott, who’s also been an actor for the last 20 years, has written and produced shows for The Great American Melodrama in Oceano and has worked with San Luis Obispo Repertory Theatre. He asked Keyser-Goodnow what she wanted to see, took her feedback, and went to the drawing board to create a play for the department.
“We had our first meetings in the spring, with kids too. I pitched ideas. I had a couple of pages of notes,” added Abbott. “We stuck with the murder mystery farce. Over the summer, I wrote the draft of the play and then came in in the fall, and we had a reading of it, where I was just, ‘Here are the 23 roles. You do this, you do this, you do this.’ And then we read through it. [I] got a little bit of feedback from the students, and then I did some rewrites and edits. Then they started rehearsals.”
The cast and crew started their rehearsals in September after holding auditions. Abbott originally wrote “Murder Mystery, Mystery Murder” for 21 students, and Keyser-Goodnow added that in the beginning, she had 23 students who needed roles. However, before Abbott could start his rewrites to add two more roles, two of the students dropped out due to scheduling.
“It’s really, really fun so far, and the kids really got to have, like I said, a lot of input in our first meetings. Even after the readings, they got to have input about which characters they felt sort of dropped off a little bit. It’s really, reallycomplicated to have 21 characters in a show that all have a good amount of lines,” continued Keyser-Goodnow of the creative process between the students, Abbott, and herself.
She also said that, for the most part, the shows the students have done recently have been pretty heavy and serious, and she’s happy to be able to let them flourish with a comedy.
“It’s really contemporary and funny and also gives us opportunities to put on these other characters because it’s a murder mystery party,” Keyser-Goodnow said about the show.
Though they didn’t give away anything about the original play, Abbott and Keyser-Goodnow did tell Paso Robles Pressthat it is set in contemporary times, but the characters are pretending to be from the 1920s due to the theme of the murder mystery party, they’re all attending.
Abbott added that being a substitute teacher at PRHS helped him write the script because he could hear how the students (some of which are in the show) would say the lines. It also made creating something contemporary that felt organic to the drama crew spill onto the page.
“I didn’t know specifically who was going to be in it when I wrote it, but I always kind of write with actors in mind,” Abbott said. “When I write for the melodrama, I sort of cast it in my head and then write imagining them doing it, and then sometimes that person ends up doing the show, and other times they don’t. It’s fun to be like, ‘that’s a totallydifferent way to say that line that I never would have imagined.’ But it’s neat to see the difference.”
He also stated that he wrote the script in the “voice of the children,” and it gave him a good picture of the type of humor he wanted to incorporate. Just like Agatha Christie when she wrote her murder mysteries, Abbott didn’t know who the murderer was until he got to that part of his writing process, and he said he enjoyed that element of writing the show.
“It feels like Marcy’s show,” Abbott said. “I contributed my part, but it’s her and the students; they own it now. It was mine when it was just on the page, and now it’s theirs.”
“Murder Mystery, Mystery Murder runs Dec. 6, 7, 13, and 14 at 7:30 p.m. and Dec. 8 and 15 at 2 p.m. To buy tickets goto paso-high-theatre-co.ticketleap.com/murder-mystery-mystery-murder.
CAPTIONS:
Photo 1: Playwright Ben Abbott (left) and Paso Robles High School Drama Teacher Marcy Keyser-Goodnow (right) team up to bring PRHS “Murder Mystery, Mystery Murder,” an original play by Abbott for the school’s drama students. Photo by Christianna Marks
Photo 2: PRHS drama students are shown in an early rehearsal for “Murder Mystery, Mystery Murder.” Photo by Christianna Marks
Photo 3: “Murder Mystery, Mystery Murder,” was written by Playwright Ben Abbott (left) and will be directed by Paso Robles High School Drama Teacher Marcy Keyser-Goodnow. Photo by Christianna Marks
