A few playgoers attending this world-premiere production of Interrogation may claim to identify the murderer before the end of the play. They will be lying. Just as the secret of television "reality" shows is to make the viewer forget that the camera is affecting what they see, so does playwright Scott Woldman carefully and deliberately point us to what he wants us to see, or more important, what he doesn't want us to see. At the start of the play, we know that a serial killer is on the loose in the rural vicinities of Rising Sun, Indiana, and that a teenage girl, Ellie Kimbal, has gone missing from a graduation party for her boyfriend, Kevin Harper. The only clue to the circumstances of her disappearance is her favorite shirt, found buried in the woods near the Harper estate, but the biggest impediment to Deputy Griggs's investigation is the hosts themselves, each of who appears determined to see one the others go to jail for the crime. Several generations of descendents in need of "more chlorine in the gene pool" (as the deputy remarks to his supervisor) have produced a patriarch lost in a pharmaceutical fog, his empress of a wife, a brother who might be a pedophile or merely an overgrown bachelor with a socially inept sense of humor, an assortment of unhappy spouses, and the son and heir himself, whose withdrawn demeanor reflects his response to his lineage. The mother of the alleged victim likewise suffers the social disapproval inflicted on single mothers of wayward habits. As the accusations and alibis pile up to be promptly refuted or recanted, the deputy declares the case to be as confusing as "herding chickens." Audiences might also feel like they're swimming in a barrel of red herrings. Did Ellie's mother have an affair with brother-in-law George and is Ellie his illegitimate daughter? Did Mama Harper hand over her jewelry box to Ellie as the price of staying far away from her beloved boy? Did Doug's conflicted impulses toward adolescent girls finally spill their boundaries? Or did Kevin vow that his first love would never leave him? Further muddying mischief is provided by a score of incidental chiefly culled from the Nick Cave spooky-tunes canon by Thomas Dixon and a handsome weathered-wood porch assembled by Judy Radofsky and Anders Jacobson. What most keeps us as off-balanced and multi-focused as Woldman requires are the gallery of attention-sucking characters invoked by the ensemble of Artistic Home actors under Scott Wiseman's direction.
