The Shadow of the Clock

During the weekend of August 3rd through the 5th of 2023, Radio On the Lake Theatre presented my play, “The Shadow of the Clock” at the BorderLight Fringe Festival. It was an exciting, simple murder mystery with an exciting dose of weird thrown into how it would be staged: the audience was blindfolded. Voice and sound and imagination made up the entire performance.

I have John Watts to thank for the sound design. I had written the script in 2022 with a recorded performance in mind, so when I listened at our first rehearsal as our stage manager Jesse Uguccini read through each sound cue, I was sure that some would have to be cut. In my brain, the sounds that I wanted to use were too specific, too small to ever be made by hand in a way that was loud enough for a full audience.

John had a solution, a trick, for every single one of them. The play felt quiet and private and still thanks to the big performance of all these little sounds- a drawer opening, a match being struck, a signature scrawled onto a check and the sound of a hand tearing it off the checkbook. The play had loud moments too- chairs being knocked over and desperate pounds on the door. The story needed to have a balance between soft dread and bumpy panic and it was only able to do that thanks to John and our team of soundmakers: Jesse Uguccini, Justin Pollak, Em Beer, and Lauren Anthony.*

*(Special shoutout to Lauren, who composed and played our opening music: a few smooth moves on the cello. She shared, after writing this tune for the cello, that she did not know how to play one before the show. We all promptly freaked out about that)

Our sonic prop list included a crash box, a hand rung bell, a thunder sheet, a quill and some sandpaper, one cello, a door-box, a window, a curtain, a pair of shoes and one long apparatus that made the sound of a champagne bottle being uncorked.

Tim Keo was my scene partner and he made the character of Marvin Allan Docherty fascinating, desperate, shady and believable. As a character who believes he is getting closer and closer to the moment of his death, any belief the audience had in the stakes would have to come from Tim’s acting. He made the strange seem real. There were long passages of dialogue from his character where I stepped out of my role for a second and joined the audience in just listening to Tim, taking in the treasure of an actor nailing their performance.

As the detective in this murder yarn, I matched my voice to the genre so the audience would know with the first word what kind of story this was. It was a lot of fun, being able to use that low staccato with the snarls and the patter and the unimpressed deadpan. The voice for the job turned out to be a mix of Peter Falk’s Columbo and Bogart’s Bogart and a little bit of Bugs Bunny. (Everything I do, forever and always, will have a little bit of Bugs Bunny)

We found out on opening night that our first performance was sold out, which was amazing but it shocked me.

Sold out?! Who does that???

We were all excited and nervous and hoped that the mystery and the careful timing of all the surprises we had in store would thrill the audience. After all, most of them were blindfolded- they were giving us their complete mental attention and it would be a bad letdown if we didn’t use that focus to take them for a ride. Based on what the first audience gave us, they were not only on the ride, but in the air. The play and the finale got incredible reactions and over the course of the next two nights we had to raise our maximum seating capacity from thirty to sixty.

The silence of the electric concentration from the crowd made “The Shadow of the Clock” one of my favorite performance experiences ever. Witnessing the jumps and gasps and head tilts as Tim and I spoke the story was such a- well, I love mysteries. I love getting pulled into the style and danger and drama, so seeing the audience have that mental relationship with something I wrote- the kind of relationship I’ve had with books and movies since I was a kid- that was a special thing.

Talking to a crowd who just listened to the mystery you wrote is also a blast because you get to hear the theories and bets that everybody was making inside their heads. Normally I have no idea what I’m saying or doing when I talk to people after a performance, my brain is crashing after all the adrenaline. But I was so interested in hearing every single prediction that I remember them all- and I remember how happy I was to learn that they were even made in the first place…

…how happy I was to know people felt like they were in the hands of a good mystery.