The Mysterious Elephant

BLEEDING-HEAD LIBERAL Scott Cupper takes one for the team.

Photo: Josh Hawkins

The wish to be able to change the trajectory of your story is surely not uncommon, but for orphans Esther and Edward Addington it’s especially urgent: Their story, as its full title—The Mysterious Elephant, or the Terrible Tragedy of the Unlikely Addington Twins* (*Who Kill Him)—indicates, is a tragedy. Tragedies don’t end well, the twins’ narrator informs them from his narrating chair, and he will brook no arguments from his subjects, who would much rather find themselves in a comedy or an adventure story. But the twins soon learn from a conversation with their recently deceased great aunt Ernestine that the narrator may have an agenda of his own. Everything hinges on the continuing welfare of the bejeweled clockwork elephant in the room.

Playwright Schwartz thrives at the intersection of goofy and ghoulish, and the quasi-Victorian Elephant environment only makes the obligatory invocations of Edward Gorey and Charles Addams even harder for us to avoid. Schwartz, though, also cuts her creepiness with a kindness less common in the cartoonists’ work.

The toys in Schwartz’s toy box are classics, yet the way she plays with them makes them seem fresh, tweaking conventions both literary and theatrical (in the awkward pause after the musical number introducing their dead relatives, nonplussed Esther asks, “Should we clap?”). Winning, wide-eyed weirdos Carol Enoch and Matt Holzfeind as the twins anchor a crack cast of crackpots. Schwartz’s company, Strange Tree, renders her plays with an immersive enthusiasm that serves to mask minor flaws in her writing; though Elephant’s second act meanders a bit, we’re coasting on so much goodwill we hardly notice.