Stop, you're killing me

I am standing in a dark alley in Old Town on a Friday night with a group of excited tourists. "In this dark and spooky alley, a beautiful young girl was once brutally killed!" the tour guide bellows. "To this day, her spirit haunts this dark alley. And no one ever found out who she was!"

At that point, a shot rings out, and down falls not the tour guide, as I had hoped, but a member of the group. The excited tourists shriek. The tour guide instructs the group to search the victim's pockets for clues to his identity, and they discover from a note that his name was Rick and he had an appointment nearby in five minutes.

"I'll stay with the body," says the tour guide. "You go and tell Rick's friend what happened."

Killing Rick, described by its creators as "guerilla theater with a twist of noir," is a new drama from C. P. Antics, the Prague street theater company. It is the second collaboration between Artistic Director Cara Clark, 44, and Producer Matthew Pfleuger, 35.

"It all started when we took a really bad Ghost Tour in Prague," explains Clark. "It got us thinking, what would happen if someone got murdered on a guided tour in front of the group?"

Like C. P. Antics' first production, The Tale, a theatrical game for children performed around Prague Castle, Killing Rick is an interactive performance in which the audience is part of the action. "Our whole goal is to make sure our guests are not passive viewers," Pfleuger explains.

The play is a strange blend of murder mystery, street theater and heckling, with roots in Brechtian theater. Following Brecht's precepts, Killing Rick is a simple narrative performed on the streets without a fixed script by actors who engage with the audience. Theater, Brecht wrote, should "shock" and "alienate" its audience into activity.

As the group makes its way through the spider-leg streets of Old Town, shock and alienation are setting in. I neurotically examine the rest of the audience, wondering who else is an actor. "What do you do?" I ask the man next to me slyly. "I'm a computer programmer," he says. I am amazed by his cunning.

We walk from meeting to meeting with a series of trenchcoat-wearing characters straight out of a film noir. Every actor drops a few clues and sends us to the next meeting point. "If you wanna know who killed Rick, go an' talk to his girlfriend, Cotton; she works at the Pussy Deluxe Club," a grimacing man in leather tells us.

Inside the Pussy Deluxe, a woman in a white crop-top and bra is dancing with a pole. "Is that Cotton?" one of our group asks the barman, pointing at the pole. "Sure," says the barman.

An American girl approaches Cotton, who is now climbing the pole. "Hi, Cotton," she says. "We want to ask you a few questions." Cotton turns upside down and slips off her bra.

"We know about you and Rick," the American girl says severely. Cotton strokes her panties.

"Look, here's a note you wrote." Cotton looks scared and climbs down from the pole. "I do not understand," she says, then goes to sit next to a weedy man in the corner and begins nibbling his ear.

We ring the emergency number written on the back of our map. "You went the wrong way," the tour guide explains. "You were supposed to meet Cotton in the street."

Out in the street, we find the real Cotton wearing fake fur. "That floozy in there was tryin' to steal the name I've taken years to build up," she explains in a camp Bronx accent.

After that the pace accelerates, and seedy characters seem to appear under every street lamp. The plot twists like the crooked streets. A rumpled detective who looks like he just crawled out from under Raymond Chandler's bed appears, promising to solve the crime. The story swiftly reaches a dramatic, if not entirely unexpected, conclusion.

Like its audience, Killing Rick is lost and confused. It does not know whether it is Brecht minus the politics, a rambling noir or a game with no winner. Its strength is that the confusion creates an original, intriguing and unpredictable piece of theater. While it's not a play that will send you home soul-searching or debating the merits of modern theater, it will provide an amusing and surprising night.

"We want our audience to buy into the fantasy that you can step into a different world," Pfleuger says. A world ruled by the god Muddle, but that is its charm.

Natalia O'Hara can be reached at
features@praguepost.com