The most famous train in detective fiction is pulling into north Fargo this fall. Undiscovered Country Productions will stage Murder on the Orient Express at the Fargo Masonic Center, 1405 3rd St N, for six performances: 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 22, 23, 24, 29 and 30, plus a 3 p.m. matinee on Sunday, Oct. 25. Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for students and seniors.
It is a fitting choice for a company that has always gone its own way. Undiscovered Country Productions is an independent theatre company based in Fargo, founded by Catherine Olsen and Ryan Metzger. Its early reputation was built on Shakespeare performed outdoors. By the summer of 2006, InForum was describing the troupe as having staged three of the Bard's great tragedies before making a lighter-hearted return to Island Park with Much Ado About Nothing, performed free at the Jerry Scherling Court Complex. A free Shakespeare in the park run is about as far from a ticketed murder mystery in a Masonic hall as a company can get, but the through-line is the same: classic texts, staged locally, without waiting for a big institution to do it first.
Many of the people involved with Undiscovered Country, including its founders, have also worked in locally made films, which gives the company a hybrid character unusual among Fargo-Moorhead theatre groups. That background matters for a show like this one. Murder on the Orient Express is a machine built out of entrances, alibis and close observation -- a snowbound train car full of strangers who all have something to hide -- and it rewards a cast that knows how to hold a stage in a tight space.
The version Fargo audiences will see is not the 1974 Sidney Lumet film with its all-star train, nor the Kenneth Branagh movies. It is Ken Ludwig's stage adaptation, written at the request of the Agatha Christie Estate. It premiered at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, on March 14, 2017, directed by McCarter artistic director Emily Mann. Ludwig is best known as a farceur -- Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo -- and his Orient Express keeps the wit of the novel while trimming the passenger list. The published licensing information lists a cast of ten and a running time of about one hour and fifty minutes, which is a brisk clip for a story with this many suspects.
The source material is one of the best-selling mysteries ever written. Agatha Christie published Murder on the Orient Express in 1934, and its solution -- which this article will not spoil, though it is among the most talked-about endings in the genre -- has kept the book in print and in adaptation for nine decades. Christie knew her trains; the Orient Express was a real luxury service, and the novel's snowdrift-stranded sleeping car gave her a closed circle of suspects as tight as any country house. Ludwig's job was to make that circle work on a stage, where a train compartment has to be suggested rather than filmed.
The venue adds its own texture. The Fargo Masonic Center was built in 1970 and is home to Shiloh Lodge, Sunrise Lodge, East Gate Lodge and Daylight Lodge, along with appendant Masonic bodies including the Scottish Rite, York Rite and Order of the Eastern Star. It is not a purpose-built theatre, and that is part of the appeal: the building's event space holds a few hundred people, close enough that a raised eyebrow from Poirot will carry to the back row. It also means the production has to solve the train problem with staging rather than scenery, which is where small companies tend to be most inventive.
For anyone who has only met the story on screen, the stage version offers something the films cannot: the collective hush of a room full of people realizing, at the same moment, that they have been had. That is the particular pleasure of a whodunit performed live, and it is why the genre has never gone out of fashion. Six chances to be fooled, spread across two weekends in late October, with a Sunday matinee for anyone who would rather not drive home in the dark.
Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for students and seniors. The Fargo Masonic Center is at 1405 3rd St N in Fargo.