Student whodunit comes to Hockinson school stage

“Something is amiss — something is decidedly amiss.” So mutters Desmond Knight, one guest among many at a sumptuous but isolated French chateau, who sniffs that something is wrong but can’t quite figure out what.

Once the inevitable dead body turns up, though, he knows to instantly blame the butler. Because it’s just that simple in these classic murder-mystery situations.

“Always Blame the Butler” is the name of this new full-length, two-act play penned by 18-year-old playwright Matthew Phillips, a senior at Hockinson High School, and directed by Phillips and fellow senior Anna Uusitalo.

In this case, though, automatically fingering the help doesn’t solve anything. Three student butlers are all bustling around in this play, tending to an eccentric and demanding group of guests before graduating from international butler school. You know your final exam is going especially badly when people start dying.

“This is a great tradition” that’s grown up in the Hockinson High School theater department, teacher Greg Saum said: Each year for the past several, students have written and staged their own original winter play. Last year, it was a trio of senior girls who reworked and updated Shakespeare’s Macbeth by weaving in other fairytale material; after that, Phillips came to Saum and volunteered to write an entirely original script.

“It’s totally amazing. It’s huge, longer than 60 pages,” Saum said. And, he added, it’s really good. It’s full of well-drawn characters that actors can really sink their teeth into, and it made Saum laugh out loud, he said. “It’s the strongest script I have ever seen from my students, and I am extraordinarily proud of their work,” he said.

Seriously screwball

Phillips said he took in lots of classic mystery movies — from serious to screwball, Agatha Christie to Mel Brooks — before trying his hand at a comedy whodunit of his own. He admitted that he found the humor easier to supply than the complex, unpredictable plotting one might expect from a murder mystery. And life got in the way too, he added; last summer was full of challenges that prevented him from focusing on playwrighting, he said, and what he should have spent months working on was compressed into about two chocolate-fueled weeks of overnighters last fall. (“I’m LDS, so no coffee,” Phillips said.)

Part of the challenge, he added, was writing for an entire theater class. That’s a Hockinson requirement: Your play must include some sort of role for everyone in Saum’s theater class. Tally up the three nervous butlers, the seven kooky guests and the other minor but crucial roles, and you’ve got quite a crowd — 23 characters in all. Phillips said he couldn’t resist basing some of them on current celebrities who are treated to some pretty sharp satire. That’s part of the fun, he said. (We’ve been sworn to secrecy about just which famous figures come in for a drubbing.)

But deadlines are deadlines, Saum said. He normally likes to be able to rehearse a play for 12 weeks; this one will get just five. And so be it, he said. “I have no problem letting them sweat,” he said. The deadline pressure has brought out the best in the students, he added, as they worked hard to learn their lines in a hurry over Christmas break. Perhaps more so than a play chosen and directed by a teacher, they’re treating this one as a genuine team effort, he said.

“Everything and everyone have pulled together really well,” Phillips agreed. “Nobody wants to see each other fail.”

But directing and managing your own peers can get a little weird, co-director Uusitalo said. “You give them notes and you ask them to do it differently. You see what works and what doesn’t or what could work better. It’s really fun” but it can create friction too, she said.

On the other hand, Phillips added, there’s nothing greater than when your actors make it work better than you ever envisioned, “and it just blows your mind.”