Mystery man Trinity tackles Dickens’s Edwin Drood BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

A melodrama? Isn’t that what’s also called bad writing? And yet Trinity Repertory Company is trying to turn that into good theater? Hmmm . . . on second thought, isn’t this a delicious opportunity?

"Actually, yeah," says Amanda Dehnert, Trinity Rep’s acting artistic director and confessed fan of mystery potboilers. She is staging The Mystery of Edwin Drood (September 9 through October 9. "It was something that really attracted me to the piece, the challenge of that. I’ve never done a melodrama.

"I realized that the characters are so extreme and the situations are so extreme, full and dire, that if you just play that," she adds, "the comedy comes not from the commenting on it, not from the ‘I’m acting!’ wink-wink, but from the fact that they can shift so quickly. Somebody can say: ‘I want you dead! Can you pass the tea?’ It just goes boom, boom. That’s fun."

Both the fun and the prospect of doing a good job of it were enhanced by playwright Rupert Holmes making himself available for numerous phone conversations about shaping the Providence production. Despite Edwin Drood gathering up five Tony Awards for its 1986 Broadway run — including Best Musical and Best Book — Holmes made major revisions, amounting to a new playscript, for its subsequent London production. Though the changes were largely rearranging scenes for clarity, he stressed to Dehnert that getting the human, beating heart of the play right was more important than slick execution.

The adaptation is set in a late 19th-century music hall, in which the bawdy, brazen actors mingle with audience members. We are assigned by the ringmaster of a company manager, known as the Chairman (Brian McEleney), the task of deciding how the story should end. Was the gentlemanly Drood (Rachael Warren), who was betrothed to the delicate Rosa Bud (Jessie Austrian), murdered by the jealous and lustful choirmaster John Jasper (Michael Hance)? By aspiring playwright Mr. Bazzard (Stephen Berenson)? The penniless Neville Landless (Mauro Hantman)? By one of numerous others — perhaps even unintentionally?

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was left unfinished by Charles Dickens at his death in 1870, creating the kind of cliffhanger that’s hard to beat. Serialized in a periodical like most of his previous and enormously popular novels, the ending was left yawning open like a cut-off life itself. Next to that, the question of who killed J.R. appears downright trivial.

"When he died, it was right at the point where the murder had happened — or was it a murder?" says Warren, who plays Drood. She and Dehnert were speaking during a dinner break in the theater’s archives room. "It’s just before you’re able to narrow it down — everybody is very suspicious for it. He died and he left no notes for the rest."

Holmes’s clever idea was to make a virtue of necessity. The first act ends with the puzzling death of Drood, and after intermission the audience gets to decide whodunit. Not only that, but they get to vote on the true identity of the mysterious detective Dick Datchery and also on which of the various possible romantic pairings will get together to give the tale a nice Victorian happy ending.

For Warren, the role of Drood is a reprise. She was cast in the part at Illinois Wesleyan University, which she and Dehnert both attended in the early ’90s. "It was the first play I did in my serious training, so I was at a very driven point in my life as an actor," she says. "We had a great time with it."

Dehnert observes that Dickens was quite a "theatrical writer," not just for the kind of the descriptions that get contemporary writers called cinemagraphic, but also because he was a ham. Dickens enthusiastically acted out scenes during his reading tours in America, such as the one for Oliver Twist. "He loved doing the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes, when he added that to his repertoire — it’s gory and horrible!" Dehnert says.

But in the last analysis, she feels, The Mystery of Edwin Drood was more than an opportunity for further melodrama.

"Ultimately this piece is really about — oh, it’s so Our Town," Dehnert declares, turning to Warren and referring to a life-affirming monologue by Emily Webb in that play. "What’s that thing she says? How precious life is when you live it every, every minute? That’s actually what this piece is about: survival and existing and just doing what you do because you don’t know when you’re not going to get to do it anymore."