Fools Playing Fools: The handsome young director, Ned Savage, of an Off-Broadway production of “Twelfth Night” has his head bashed in. Whodunnit? Twists and turns abound as the fools on the stage play the fools in the play.

Fools Playing Fools: Mystery/Crime/LGBTQ

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BLURB: Fools Playing Fools

No sooner has handsome, partially disabled Ned Savage moved into the apartment next door to Hugo Miller than he is apparently murdered with a heavy candlestick to his head while he is collapsing into anaphylactic shock in his living room, due to a fungus that is commonly found on marijuana plants. The action happens in and around several productions of “Twelfth Night” in NYC and at a nearby Shakespeare festival. Hugo, Gabriele and Ruth travel to California to see a high-tech cannabis operation, to London to visit Ned’s pregnant wife (a secret marriage), and to Istanbul to meet a famous author who has invested in Ned’s career. Ned’s sexuality and his pregnant wife’s preferences aren’t clear, and Gabriele Cortese is part of a love triangle involving both of them. But the keys to the solution are found on a stormy night filled with lightning and fools in New York City.

EXCERPT: Fools Playing Fools

I’m a fan of Twelfth Night, one of those plays that never seems to lose its freshness or its punch. Other than Macbeth, I think it is the Shakespeare play I have seen most often. It has such wonderful slapstick comedy scenes, and I marvel at the ways a good director can make the audience laugh on cue, in spite of the fact that the language is obviously over four hundred years old.

As I looked at the material online about the WSR production, I was taken aback at one casting choice. Malvolio, arguably the antagonist in this dark comedy, was to be played by a woman. That would have all the opportunities a director could need for silly laughs, because Malvolio’s failing is that he falls in love with his employer, Viola, when he finds what he thinks is a love note addressed to him from Viola.

“You know,” Ruth said, “I know the actress who’s playing Malvolio. Brilliant idea.”

“Who dat?”

“Her name is Lily Rasmussen; she’s made a career out of playing old maids and schoolteachers. Tall, gangly and awkward, with electrified hair that stands out from her head. You feel like laughing immediately when you see her.” She showed me a photo online.

“She looks vaguely familiar. Looks like a descendent of Margaret Hamilton when she was the Wicked Witch of the West. Like a hayseed Mrs. Malaprop.”

“Never thought about it that way, but I take your point.”

“But you know her?”

“What I meant was that I know her work. She was a hoot in a production of that Noel Coward play about old actresses, Waiting in the Wings, a few years back. Stole the show, hilarious laughter. I would love to see a Malvolio who steals the show instead of just being the butt of all the laughs.”

“She looks to be fifty-ish.”

“Probably, yeah. Maybe more. She’s looked the same for quite a while, I think.”

“I kinda doubt she would have been alone in Ned Savage’s apartment with an opportunity to kill him.”

“Did we establish that there was no one else there but Ned and the killer?’

“Funny you should say that. As I said that about her being alone, I realized I was making all kinds of unwarranted assumptions. Nothing to say a middle-aged actress wouldn’t be there alone, especially if she was in the cast. Nothing to say there was nobody else there, could have been. And most of all, nothing to say it wasn’t a woman who did this.”

“Maybe we should talk to Lily Rasmussen then.”

“No idea how we would go about that.”

“Well, as it happens, she is a member of the Opera League, so she should be in the directory.”

“So, you do know her, not just her work.”

“Not really. I’ve just seen her there on Monday nights for a long time. Don’t recall ever speaking with her.” She took my tablet and launched a browser. A minute or two later she had a phone number and email address.

“You are a miracle worker at times, ma’am.”

The actress responded right away to Ruth’s text, so we headed over to talk to her. Lily was a good deal less a caricature at home than she might be on stage. She was near my height (6’4”), not skinny but not inclined to be heavy, sixty-ish. Slump-shouldered as tall women were apt to be when society expected them to be shorter than their husbands, even when wearing high heels. Her hair was curly, cut fairly close to the head and clearly bottle-brown with some lighter streaks—I thought when I first saw her that she was wearing a wig. A wide mouth jammed full of teeth and a smile that would read well in the second balcony. Hard to describe her voice, sort of a gurgling alto, on the edge of laughter much of the time. Dimples. Still the look of a Valkyrie; a hint of majesty as you would expect from the daughter of a god.

Lily remembered Ruth from the opera (“Of course I do”). Firm handshake when I introduced myself, and strong eye contact. I felt comfortable with her immediately. Ruth clearly felt a little stand-offish but smiled a lot.

“Are you Scandinavian?” I couldn’t resist asking.

She nodded. “Ho jo to hoand all that,” she said, quoting Brunnhilde’s war cry from the Wagner opera. “You wanted to talk about Ned. Nasty business, that, so young and talented.” She cleared her throat.

I explained that Mr. Savage’s apartment was next door to mine in Long Island City, and that I had seen him but not met him when he moved in.

“Startlingly handsome, didn’t you think?” Lily looked directly into my eyes.

“Yes, I noticed he was good looking, although only I saw him in the hallway with the movers. The impression I had of him was emphasized by the limp and the problem with one of his arms.”

She cocked her head and half-smiled. “You’re very observant.”

“I find that one advantage of getting older is that no one notices when I stare at them. Even on the subway.” I tried to put on a different, more serious face. “Was Mr. Savage well liked at West Side Rep and at St Benedict’s?”

“All directors are irritating,” she said. “But Ned balanced his direction. I don’t recall a time when he didn’t have a smile and attentive eye contact. Yes, I would say he was popular with the cast and crew. Very helpful in little ways. Big thing for me, he told me to keep my hands within the envelope of my body, that it would increase the impact I made on the audience when I reached out. He was right. I’ve always had a tendency to wave my hands around, like Zasu Pitts.”

“Do you have any idea why someone would have wanted to kill him?”

She made a motion of shaking something off or shivering in a cold wind and shook her head negatively.

“Is there any time in Twelfth Nightwhen someone picks up a candlestick and waves it around?” Ruth asked.

“Interesting. No, and even though this production was to have been an innovative approach to the play, nothing super-different that I saw in any of the rehearsals.” She pursed her lips a bit and said, “You’re wondering if there was a rehearsal in process. No, I don’t think so.”

“How about a sword or a bottle? Something that a candlestick could be for rehearsal purposes?”

She looked up and dragged her right hand from her chin down her neck while she thought. “Well, Sir Toby is a drunk,” she said, referring to one of the characters in the play. “He could be waving a bottle around, I suppose, but I don’t recall anything like that.”

Ruth nodded. “Did he rehearse any of the actors separately from the rest of the cast?”

“Possibly, I suppose. I don’t know.”

“Did he work with you one-on-one?”

“No.”

I jumped in. “I keep wondering why he wanted to cast Malvolio as a woman.”

“He didn’t. Malvolio is a man; has to be to be enough of a fool to make a pass at his boss, Viola. He wanted a woman—me—to play a man, which is different from pretending Malvolio is a woman. I suppose because that’s already a theme in the play with Olivia falling in love with Viola dressed up as a boy, and it can get a lot of laughs. You know Hamlet is sometimes played by a woman?”

“How did you get involved?” Ruth asked.

“Been part of West Side Rep for years, but I didn’t audition for Malvolio. He approached me.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Not with Ned. I think he cast almost everyone that way. Like he kept a rolodex of people he wanted to work with or something like that.” She paused then added, “We had worked together before, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. Also Shakespeare?”

She harrumphed a bit and shook her head. “Tennessee Williams. Play called Sweet Bird of Youth.I was Alexandra del Lago, a movie star kinda like Gloria Swanson in ‘Sunset Boulevard’; alcoholic and drug addict running from a recent movie that flopped. Ned was a bartender in the hotel I was staying in.”

“You mean the hotel you were staying in while you were in the play?” I asked.

“No, the bartender in the play. The character was named Stuff, which originally meant it was intended to be a Black man since it was set in the South when it was still completely segregated. Ned had a way of attracting attention even in a small role, and that was probably the first role he got in New York. He moved here from LA, you know. The bartender is a snitch for the bad guy in the play, fellow named Tom Finley Junior.”

She paused, smiling, remembering. “Probably six years ago or so. I liked playing Alexandra del Lago. I wasn’t paired with anyone, just a character that made the plot go forward. Not all that different from Malvolio I guess, in some ways. She called herself Princess Kosmonopolis because she wanted to be incognito. We ran for six weeks.”

“Also West Side Rep?”

“No. Independent production where we got paid scale. Not much money but good exercise.”

“I saw you in Waiting in the Wings,” Ruth said.

Lily beamed. “You should talk to Gianfranco Mirabella. He’s in the production, but he was Perry in ‘Waiting in the Wings.’ So you saw him when you saw me. Amazing that when Noel Coward wrote that play, the first producer dropped it because it was too old-fashioned. It’s really hilarious, lots of loud laughing in the audience.” She pulled a notepad out of what I had presumed was a knitting bag and jotted something down and handed it to me. “Tell Frangooch I sent you.”

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