Creative Commons, Photo by Matthias Rhomberg.
By Kirsten Fuller, Managing Editor & Gabrielle Moore, Editor-in-Chief
Two driving factors for theater Director Eric Skiles and the department to choose Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, was the idea of honoring female playwrights and murder mystery. The Mousetrap (with an added modern twist) is an edge of your seat, visual page-turner, classic murder mystery question of ”Who done it?” This well-renowned play still shows eight times a week at St. Martin’s Theatre in South London.
Aside from the immense length of the play, there is something that can be taken away from this. “Things may look a certain way to the obvious eye, but really keep all options in mind,” Carl Hailey said, an alumnus who played “Detective Sergeant Trotter, “kind of like Sherlock Holmes, if you eliminate all other options, what is left, even if it’s unbelievable, that must be the answer.”
Creative Commons, Photo by shrinkin’violet.
The cast consisted of three alumni, four current LSC-Kingwood students, and one service area high school student. The seven who were casted after Labor Day. The cast and crew were all part of the collaboration process in creating Christie’s play at LSC-Kingwood. When Skiles was asked how he viewed directing:
“I view directing as being an air traffic controller. My job is to let all the planes fly around because they know what to do. I just have to have to keep them from running into each other.”
The theater department has three upcoming productions of Spring 2017: Ann-Marie McDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet directed by Kalliope Vlahos is first to premiere on the Main Stage of the Performing Arts Center on February 23rd at 7:30 p.m.
These four productions are part of the 2016-2017 theater season where the department is asking the school to join them in celebrating the female playwrights, to which Katelynn Bauer who played as “Miss Casewell” in The Mousetrap said, “it’s great that they’re focusing on that.”