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TAMPA — Philip Marlowe meets dance in Case Number 346: Sarah Mayes. Now playing at the Gorilla Theatre, this is a piece by Chase Adin (who is also in the cast) that opens in vintage hard-boiled fashion, with a dead body on the floor.
The corpse is Sarah Mayes, a pretty young blond played by Amanda Reardon, and she's being examined by a guy in a fedora who is writing in a notebook. He's the solemn private eye who tells the story (sometimes in voice-overs) and is portrayed in suitably baffled style by Zo Vallejo-Bryant.
The idea here is that the private eye is haunted by the Mayes murder, coming out of three years of solitude to reopen the case and try to figure out what truly happened. Good luck. His old notes are enigmatic, and the principal source of information, an oily marketing man named Mr. Kirk (Stephen Ray), is evasive. Mayes herself — in flashbacks — communicates with the detective entirely in dance.
An odd couple, the Belms (Adin and Shana Perkins), were convicted of murdering Mayes, and they, too, express themselves in dance, punctuated by a prim little kiss in each number. Everyone but the private eye and Mr. Kirk is a dancer. Sarah does contemporary ballet, the Belms do modern dance, and two black-clad ghosts (Ben Mercado and Asha Nathan) do hip-hop, all to an ominous electronic score by Chris Ferguson. (Sarah Hayes plays Mayes on Sunday and Sept. 11.)
Mashing up film noir and dance is good creepy fun, and Adin's spare production — the set consists of the detective's desk and file cabinet, a streetlight, a table and chairs, and a pair of doorways on wheels — zips along in just over an hour, plus intermission. But don't expect to get to the bottom of the mystery.
"Who killed Sarah Mayes?" the private eye shouts at the end, tossing his hat down next to the body.
The answer to that question is never really answered.
John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716. He blogs on Critics Circle at tampabay.com/blogs/critics.
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