The Play That Goes Wrong

The Play That Goes Wrong at Spencer Theatre At Kansas City Repertory Theatre

A fictional 1920s drawing-room whodunit becomes the backdrop for theatrical disaster when the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society takes on The Murder at Haversham Manor at Kansas City Repertory Theatre. Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, The Play That Goes Wrong puts you in the audience for an amateur company whose dignified murder mystery unravels in real time—and the harder these performers try to salvage their show, the deeper the chaos gets.

The central pleasure here is watching determined characters refuse to give up. Doors won't open. A corpse can't stay convincingly dead. Lines vanish from memory at the worst possible moment. Yet the Cornley players press on with misplaced confidence, improvising around each new catastrophe while pretending everything is going exactly as planned. Their absolute commitment to rescuing a performance that's clearly doomed makes every recovery attempt funnier than the last.

Physical comedy drives the mayhem. The Play That Goes Wrong builds an unstable set that behaves as unpredictably as the people navigating it, with furniture and scenery joining the rebellion against the actors' best intentions. The contrast between the company's stately murder-mystery ambitions and their actual onstage reality fuels the humor—imagine Agatha Christie colliding with pure pandemonium.

Stuart Carden directs this Spencer Theatre production, bringing the scripted chaos to Kansas City. Grab your tickets and settle in for a show-within-a-show where every effort to restore order guarantees something else will collapse.