Mary MacDonald Kerr plays the title character in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's latest show The Detective's Wife. The character is a Chicagoan who was obsessed with mystery novels. It took the death of her husband in the line of duty to realize her obsession. Her husband was a homicide detective. The more she thought about her husband's death, the more it occurred to her that there may be more at work then hey senseless death in the line of duty.
Kerr has a very approachable kind of vulnerability onstage. As witnessed in shows like Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's The Sweetest Swing in Baseball some and Renaissance Theaterworks' Burn This, Kerr he has a way of delivering a character's inner thoughts that doesn't overplay the intellectual side of the character in the body language or any kind of physical manifestation. It feels like a very organic and well grounded kind of intellectual struggle that she's having here. It's that much easier to connect up with her as an audience and identify with what the character's going through. And it plays with the character and with the script quite well.
Kerr is aided in her characterization and delivery of the story with video graphics that are projected onto stylish screens. The video graphics are very thoughtfully designed. The tendency may want to be to render things in very minute detail. (This is a mystery after all.) However, so much of the detail would get lost even in a studio theatre environment. And too much detail would be too much of a distraction from what Kerr is performing. However, be too simplistic about things and the visuals loses their impact. The graphics as designed for this production are very good at striking the right balance.
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The script in question is making an appearance in Milwaukee debut here after having premiered elsewhere not too long ago. It's a very contemporary story set just a little bit further down the coast. The story leaves certain things about its reality decidedly ambiguous. There are two possibilities here:One is that we are playing audience to a grieving widow's attempt to make sense of what is essentially a senseless death. And she's seeing patterns where there are none. There's particularly clever bit of symbolism drawn in the character lying down where her husband had been murdered and looking out at the stars in the sky and seeing constellations--patterns put together by earlier cultures to help us make sense of things. Of course, there is also the very distinct possibility that the conspiracy that the character is pursuing is something more than imagined. More so than the story of a murder, this is an exploration into the heart oft he character we see before us. It's a story about how we all tell ourselves stories.
Whether there was more behind the detective's death than bad luck is eventually resolved. It is interesting to note that it's written well enough that the script would have been satisfying had ended either way. Either a personal journey to try to understand what turns out to be a meaningless death or uncovering a vast conspiracy could have worked equally well. And though it would come across as being perhaps a little too much like a gimmick, the playwright could have written the ending both ways and alternated endings over the course of a run of a show. Personally I would have thought of that as being more satisfying than the ending in question.
It's weird to think that a dual ending would have been more satisfying. The mystery itself that's being related here is a lot more interesting than any one conclusion. Or maybe it's just the fact that Kerr is so good at telling this story that I didn't quite want it to end. It can't go on forever, though. The character is imbalanced and she needs to reach a sense of resolution about things. The interesting thing, though is that we don't know that necessarily there will be a neat and tidy conclusion here. And that feels very satisfying. Because we know from the outset that we're not seeing a cookie-cutter murder mystery story. We know just as in real life we know that conclusions aren't always reached. The murderers aren't always punished and motivation isn't always as simple as it seems.
The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's production of The Detective's Wife runs through October 13th at the Broadway Theatre Center's Studio Theatre. For ticket reservations, call 414-291-7800 or visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.
