by John Soltes | December 14, 2020
Citizen Detective, the new hit show from the Geffen Playhouse’s acclaimed online offerings, is a true-crime whodunit that puts the audience in the role of the detective. The show, which plays out over Zoom, is a 90-minute exploration filled with interactivity, murderous details and a few head-scratching moments that will have the viewer shuffling the deck on possible suspects. Performances run through Feb. 7, and virtual seats are hard to come by.
The show is the brainchild of Chelsea Marcantel, a director and playwright whose previous works include Airness, Everything Is Wonderful and Tiny Houses. She is currently under commission at the Geffen for a stage play, but the muse struck her when she realized the potentiality of the Zoom medium. In fact, it was another Geffen online show, Helder Guimarães’ The Present (not to be confused with his new magic show, The Future), that inspired her to put on the thinking cap.
“So I’ve had a relationship with them since 2018, and when I saw Helder’s first show, The Present, I thought I wonder if they’re going to do more of these because at that time we had no timeline when we were going to go back to our regular rehearsal process,” Marcantel said in a recent phone interview. “And so I reached out to Rachel Wiegardt-Egel, the manager of new play development, and I said, ‘Are you hearing pitches for these Zoom plays?’ She said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to try to do more of them if you have an idea,’ and I didn’t really have a fully formed idea at that time.”
The playwright knew that she wanted to present a theatrical piece via Zoom that didn’t try to make the audience believe they weren’t watching a show on Zoom. As she said, they weren’t going to perform King Lear on the online platform and pretend they were in the theater together.
“I wanted the premise of the show to be a reason people would be going on Zoom, and I really love true crime,” she said. “And I’m fascinated by these big true crime events, and I thought, I wonder what all the people are doing that didn’t go to Crime Con this year?”
Citizen Detective came from this combination of Zoom as a theatrical medium and true crime as a obsession that has taken over the United States and the world. The next decision for Marcantel was to decide on a case. Now, this article will not reveal the details of what audience members specifically experience when taking in a performance of Citizen Detective, but there will be some general descriptions. Readers can continue at their own risk.
“Do I want to create a totally new case, or did I want to go with something that was real,” she asked. “And what’s interesting for me really is how people interact around true crime, and I thought, well, if people want to go a murder mystery dinner party where it’s a game and there’s a made-up case and definitely one murderer that everybody figures out, that’s a thing that they can already do on Zoom. There are other companies doing that, so I started reading about just famous unsolved cases. I wanted it to be something where none of the participants were still alive. I didn’t want to infringe on anybody’s privacy or have a family feel upset, and when I ran across this case, I thought, oh, this is perfect. It’s 100 years old. It’s set in Los Angeles. It’s got all these amazing suspects that are characters in their own right. It just seemed like the perfect fit.”
Guiding the audience through the evening is the famed mystery writer Mickie McKittrick (Mike Ostroski), and there’s a super true-crime fan who also helps along the way (Paloma Nozicka). Before enjoying these 90 minutes on Zoom, audiences actually have some homework to accomplish before the performance. Again, details are being kept to a minimum in this article, but here’s how Marcantel described the pre-show work.
“I have a master’s degree in education, so I drew a lot from my teaching experience,” the playwright said. “How do we set people up for success? How do we make it feel like all of the victories in the show belong to the audience? There’s so much reading that needs to be done in order to be able to speak about this case. It seems like we couldn’t send out enough information ahead of time. People wouldn’t have enough time to become an expert on the case. What if they became an expert on one suspect? And that seemed like the best way to break it down. OK, we have to divide people into groups. And we can do it arbitrarily, but wouldn’t it be more fun if you ended up in a group of people that kind of liked to solve problems the way that you do.”
The secrets about the show are best kept a secret. In fact, that’s a statement that works for many of the productions at the Geffen Playhouse (or the Geffen Stayhouse). From David Kwong’s Inside the Box to Guimarães’ magical offerings, audiences are asked to keep their experiences to themselves. The same goes for Citizen Detective.
“I specifically didn’t want any of the marketing to reveal which case it was,” Marcantel said. “Although now a lot of reviewers have mentioned it, so if you read a review, it won’t be a surprise. I didn’t want people to feel like they had to study up on the case. Then some people show up and be experts and have more of an opinion.”
Here’s what the playwright did allow: “It’s a very famous case. It’s very well covered in the media, and so we inevitably have a person [who goes], ‘Oh, I saw a Buzzfeed video about this,’ or ‘I just listened to a podcast about this.’ Almost every night there’s one person, which is great because there’s so much about this case that I’m not able to fit into just 90 minutes, and if someone comes with other expertise or they want to share, then that’s great. It makes the show better for everybody.”
There’s one secret that Marcantel doesn’t mind letting out of the bag. “I also never tried to conceal that Mickie wasn’t real or that Andrea wasn’t an actor,” she said. “I didn’t want the audience feeling like we were trying to pull anything over on them. That’s why both of their names are listed on the program. Yeah, this is a play. This is not the part of the show you need to be figuring out.”
There’s plenty of other details to figure out.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Citizen Detective directed and written by Chelsea Marcantel is currently playing through Feb. 7 at the Geffen Stayhouse. Tickets: $65. Running time: 90 minutes. Click here for more information and tickets.
