WEEK IN THEATRICAL PARODIES

The other day I (actually, literally) woke up from a dream that I was in the writing room for Production Workshop’s Hint!, a parody of Clue, the play based on the movie based on the board game. But in my dream, instead of being in the basement of Sayles Hall we were deep underground, and instead of saying words or funnies, co-director Annie Stein ’24 just sat in a child’s desk chair and screamed.

I think I was dreaming what it must’ve been like in late January, days before Brown reconvened for the spring semester, when Broadway Licensing refused Production Workshop the rights to perform Clue. This happened for no apparent reason besides a contemporaneous regional production running this March and April in Long Island. I caught up with directors Annie and co-director Finn Blomquist Eggerling ’23.5 to talk about the fallout of this rejection: “I was just walking around the streets of New York, like, what am I doing with my life? I felt like my entire identity crumbled because I’d constructed my semester around this dream that I was going to direct this play that was so specific to my childhood and my wants and my desires moving forward as someone who wants to do entertainment long term,” said Finn. In a later email chain they further expanded on the importance of Clue in their life. Growing up in rural Minnesota, Finn found their surroundings “muted and vacant.” They “became obsessed with diving into an ocean of fabulous, glamorous media. I loved Lady Gaga and Alexander McQueen and Clue: the Movie—anything that represented an art and taste that transcended my immediate surroundings. While I have since accepted that Minnesota is integral to my taste and my art, the obsession with severe maximalism remains. It drives the way I create. It’s the reason I want to create. I’m not great with subtlety, but neither was Clue and neither is Hint!”

By the time Annie and Finn found out they couldn’t perform Clue, the cast and crew had planned, practiced, even memorized their lines— Finn described their experience: “Oh, my God. I think it was like a three day grieving process.” Stein responded, “It was like, it’s fine, we’ll do it somehow. It’s fine. Then it was crying, crying, screaming, crying, like, oh my God, how are we going to tell the actors?” But instead of quitting, they dreamt big, writing “Hint!” Ben Rosenn ’23, who plays Mr. Grass in the rewrite, told Indy correspondent Ella Spungen ’23.5 on the steps of Faunce Hall, “Here, I’ll tell you something funny.

I had memorized all of my lines for the original one, so Clue was almost an exercise for Hint!, if that makes sense. I got to really understand what the essence of the play was about before we even sat down to write it.” Resilience in the face of such abrupt change truly does justice to touring pianist Anthony E. Pratt, from whose mind the idea of “Cluedo” (originally “Murder!”; “Clue” in the US) sprung while manufacturing tank components in Birmingham, England during the Second World War. “Cluedo” was first patented in 1947, then made into a movie in 1985 (which was shipped to movie theaters with one of three possible endings, preserving the sacred mystery), then a musical in 1997, and in 2024 perhaps—20th Century Studios willing—a new movie release starring Ryan Reynolds.

Hint!, like the original Clue, stars a troupe of eclectic blackmailees all stage managed by assistant director Zach Susini ’25 who got the job because of his experience herding cats:

Teniayo-Ola Macaulay ’25 as “Mrs. Off White”

Ari Cleveland ’24 as “General Grey Poupon”

Ben Rosenn ’23 as “Mr. Grass”

Iman Husain ’23 as “Madame Merlot”

Masha Breeze ’23 as “Annette”

Lydia Riess ’24 as “Cook”

Callie Rabinovitz ’24 as “Mrs. Pigeon”

Laurel Meshnick ’23 as “Professor Purple”

Calvin Ware ’26 as “Mr. S’Boddy”

Yoni Weil ’24 as “Fernsby”

Sam Colt-Simmonds ’24 as “Unexpected Inspector”

The play begins with Mr. S’Boddy inviting the aforementioned group to his isolated mansion. Once settled, they are handed odd and useless weapons like a kazoo or a vibrator. Somehow S’Boddy is swiftly killed in total darkness. From this point onward, the play proceeds amidst murder and deception as the partiers-turned-suspects try to identify the killer among them. This play feels like 5 a.m., peeing yourself at a sleepover, or a going-toschool-naked dream. It feels like what I imagine highschoolers do at Hampton Inns after Model UN conferences.

The play was written from Wednesday, January 25 to Sunday, January 29 and was rigorously edited, blocked, and rehearsed in the three weeks following. Describing the exhausting writing process, Rosenn said, “we took scenes from the original and we had to change all the lines, so we went through the entire play, we decided what we wanted the vision for the play to look like, what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to change, and then we divided and we gave each writer a different scene. And kind of remarkably, the style and the voice all did come together, which is the thing I was most surprised about.” For a game which has gone through so many transformations, the essence of “Clue” is almost perfectly preserved because of the commitment of the cast and crew. It even feels more relevant and tangible.

To manage the short turnaround, the masterminds behind Hint! developed a process which Annie and Finn referred to as “making silly theater seriously,” and “being both productive and stupid.” The writers discussed one of the four-day-old characters, General Grey Poupon, saying he is “a George Santos… a testament to masculinity… like… Anna Delvey or Elizabeth Holmes…” This Indy writer’s friend Asa Turok ’24 was brimming with jealousy: “Not having been in the Hint! writer’s room is the greatest regret of my Brown career.”

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As much as I loved being allowed to infiltrate the writer’s room, it dawned on me only during rehearsal that I’d been swept into the Spirit of Theatre unawares. Analyzing the scene I’d stumbled into, I realized that the loss of the rights and laborious process of adapting the script had transmuted the Production Workshop Downspace into an alchemical holding chamber of fire and potential. Annie did not scream now but leapt in the air, conjuring her cast to pronounce every consonant and say the word “WHAAAT?!” with seven syllables, while Finn stared at the actors like a cat would a hanging feather toy. Finn and Annie’s collaboration was hot, and I was scared. “We definitely made it a little bit more raunchy, a little bit more contemporary,” said Rosenn. The Spirit of Theatre did its bidding and plucked me out of mundane reality. For several distinct seconds, unaware of myself, I laughed, I screamed—I dissolved into the serious silliness of the script dreamt up in five days coming to life in front of me. Come see the dream in action February 23-5!