The Play That Goes Wrong

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

A murder mystery needs poise, precision and a corpse that stays put. The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society has none of those advantages when they tackle the fictional 1920s whodunit The Murder at Haversham Manor at the Spencer Theatre, and watching their carefully rehearsed production collapse into glorious chaos is exactly the point of The Play That Goes Wrong.

Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, this physical comedy drops you into a world where amateur performers fight to salvage their show while everything conspires against them. An unstable set refuses to cooperate. Furniture becomes an adversary. Lines vanish from memory at precisely the wrong moment. The victim—who should be playing dead—keeps moving. Each fresh disaster demands quick thinking from actors who are already barely holding on, and their determination to press forward no matter what makes the unraveling oddly heroic.

The gulf between dignified mystery and total meltdown widens with each mishap. What begins as a proper drawing-room murder devolves into a battle between theatrical ambition and physical reality, and the Cornley performers refuse to surrender. Stuart Carden directs Kansas City Repertory Theatre's production, bringing scripted chaos to the Spencer stage.

Grab tickets and watch catastrophe become comedy when good intentions meet impossible odds.