Jule Selbo

MAINE CRIME WRITERS IN A FUN FORMAT! 

Next week, on Monday, January 12, at 7:30 pm, there will be a crime/mystery reading event at Portland Stage. That’s on Forest Avenue, about a block west off Congress Street.

Anita Stewart, the head of the theater, has been keeping this theater viable for the last 25 years. That’s an amazing tenure for a regional theater director. She’s dedicated to providing theatrical/live entertainment and chooses six plays each season that – for the most part – are of literary value and are full of ideas an audience can enjoy and/or chew on. I had met Anita a few times at July 4^th picnics in my neighborhood. We got to know each other and she found out (when some of my plays were done here in Portland) that I started my writing life as a NYC playwright, then moved into screenwriting in LA, and finally—when I moved to Portland I focused on my first love: novels.

At one of these picnics, she asked if I would “curate” nights of reading from novels. She told me that, before the pandemic (and before I moved to Portland), she had held a few of these nights sporadically over the years, but she was hoping to do them on a more regular basis.

She wants to continue to promote Maine writers (with some emphasis on books that take place in Maine) and give her loyal audiences a new way of experiencing writers, writing, literature and ideas. She wants to make these nights a definite part of the Portland Stage experience for her subscribers and the general walk-in audiences.

I agreed to help set up the readings. We’ve done some crime/mysteries. We’ve done romance. We’ve done memoir. The audiences keeps growing, they love this format! This Monday, January 12, it’s crime/mystery again. The readings were chosen to go along with Ken Ludwig’s comedy/mystery Lend Me A Tenor that opens at the theatre this month. After the readings (I put the novels into “script format” for the actors who are assigned parts, Portland Stage assigns a director (Todd Backus) and the novel comes to life in a new way). I get to interview the writers – the questions/content of the interviews always relate in some way to the playwright of the show we are paired with.

Ken Ludwig (playwright) is one of the most prolific playwrights alive today (35+ plays so far).

Most are comedies, some are musicals and he has taken on lately – writing mystery/crime/comedies.  He’s written plays featuring  Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty, adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work and more. He knows his genre inside and out and is intent on providing his audiences with fresh laughs, but admits he goes back to the “comedy tropes” of the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare and other fine playwrights. As I work out the questions I want to put to our writers on January 12 (Kate Flora, Matt Cost, Travis Kennedy), I hope we can explore some of the most well-loved tropes of the crime mystery genre.

Tickets are for sale at Portland Stage (it’s an inexpensive night of entertainment) and Kelly Books will have books for sale in the lobby.