*MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD*

Metea Valley’s first post-pandemic play kicked off last week, and emotions and expectations were soaring high for everyone involved. After a year and a half of slogging through dullness, would this play help to brighten up Metea’s atmosphere? Would the actors be able to pull off a performance of such an iconic game? As it turns out, the answer is: absolutely!

“I’m very proud of what we have created,” sophomore Charlotte Nordahl said, who voices the radio in the opening, “and I think that this is going to be something that the entire school [has been] needing for a while.”

There appears to be a shared sentiment among the actors in CLUE that it was a much-needed break from the droop of quarantine.

“It’s just a really refreshing thing to have after COVID and being locked in your house and not being able to go anywhere,” junior Tara Chiavola said, who portrayed the French maid, Yvette, in Pipe cast.

I can repeat their claims of the play being extremely refreshing and enjoyable. The CLUE performance I saw last Friday was a resounding success.

Firstly, the acting was phenomenal. I viewed the performance on Friday, so keep in mind that I only saw the Pipe cast perform. Peyton Owen absolutely delivered as the butler, to the point where it was a little hard to distinguish from his real self and the version he was projecting to the audience. The rest of the cast nailed the 1950-esque mannerisms of their characters, and Kevin Paul in particular executed his performance as Mr. Green excellently. It was refreshing to see that the cliche of a socially-awkward overthinking man was handled with grace and not a boring repetition of other shows. The Pipe cast delivered.

The show itself was not at all what I was expecting. I walked into the auditorium expecting a cookie-cutter murder mystery with decent digestible jokes and extremely PG comedy. Instead, what I received was a show filled with incredible light work, a magnificent set with detail in every inch, and comedy that flowed perfectly. The jokes were well-tailored toward a high-school audience, not too childish, not too mature. They struck the balance perfectly. 

Perhaps the only suboptimal aspect of the play was the physical limitations of the show. There were many scenes during the show wherein an intense amount of pressure was building and building to a heightened climax, like the death of a certain person, and the actual death scene would have no sound effect whatsoever. It would simply be an actor or actress yelping before the lights dimmed out. This lessened the immersion of the play for sure, but it is hard to say that it ruined it by any stretch. The blackout scenes without lights were genuinely emerging, and the final scene with the rewinding of storytelling was hilarious and well done. Props must also be given to the tech and build crew for hustling sets and backdrops around, creating and painting the sets in the first place, and overall working with such tenacity and fluency to keep the show running. They were the unsung heroes who worked in the shadows (literally), and they did an incredible job.

“CLUE” was a fantastic production with remarkable writing and even better acting that was sewn together magnificently by the teachers and crew that kept the whole ship afloat. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience that I recommend to anyone who is considering going. There were some technical flaws here and there, but as far as high school plays go, they were minuscule. I rate “CLUE” a solid nine out of 10, for all of these reasons and more.

“CLUE” is less about the performance itself and the intricacies of its production, and more about the laughter and delight it has offered to a crowd of people that need it most at a time like this. I believe Matthew Wolski, the theater program director of “CLUE,” put it best.

“With all that has happened the past two years, we at Metea theater felt that everyone needed to laugh, to bring some joy and silliness back to the community,” Wolski said. “We wanted a show that uses all the opportunities theater has to offer because we want to let you know that we are here for you, for the students, for each other, and for the community.”