The Play That Goes Wrong

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

A corpse keeps sitting up. A fireplace mantel tilts at an alarming angle. Someone's supposed to deliver the crucial alibi but can't remember which page they're on. The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society has chosen to stage the fictional 1920s murder mystery The Murder at Haversham Manor, and everything that can collapse is already leaning sideways before the first clue gets revealed.

Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, The Play That Goes Wrong gives you two shows for the price of one. There's the earnest whodunit these amateur performers desperately want you to see—drawing rooms, suspicious motives, a body in the library. Then there's the comedy erupting all around it as furniture betrays them, cues vanish and the victim refuses to stay dead. You get to watch both the mystery they're trying to solve and the disaster they can't stop creating.

What makes the chaos work is how hard the Cornley players fight to preserve their dignity. They're committed to finishing this supposedly elegant murder plot even as the set crumbles and their lines evaporate. Stuart Carden directs the production at the Spencer Theatre, where Kansas City Repertory Theatre brings this collision of ambition and calamity to life.

You're not just watching physical comedy spiral out of control. You're watching people who care deeply about theater lose their grip on it, one missed entrance at a time. Grab tickets to The Play That Goes Wrong at Kansas City Repertory Theatre.