A Sitcomical Murder Mystery with a Dash of the Postmodern

​Local playwright Deanna Strasse crafts a fun murder mystery comedy with The Cafe Mocha Murders, Staged as a reading on Zoom, the show features a respectably large ensemble that articulates remarkably well in the online videoconferencing format. What starts off as a light sitcom rapidly gets weird without ever losing sight of the emotional human connection that is the heart and soul of so much good comedy. The cafe-based, single-location comedy has great potential for a full production on a small stage. Strasse’s Zoom staging of it is fun and breezy. This might be one of the tighter live, local small-stage presentations to have arisen online since the emergence of the COVID pandemic.

The ever-magnetic Hayley San Fillippo is endearingly abrasive as a barista named Soma who is understandably upset when she finds out a staff meeting at the cafe is going to run far later than her usual shift. To make matters worse, Soma’s least-favorite co-worker Ivy is in attendance. Kara Penrose is a crisp, precise presence as the perfectionistic Ivy. Soma works evenings. Ivy works mornings. They’re both there for a meeting also attended by anxious new guy Ian (Christopher Goode) and seasoned long-term employees Mel (Melody Lopac) and Ben (Adam Qutaishat.) San Fillippo and Penrose are pleasant and irresistible as opposing forces of experience cast against Goode’s passionate, eager-to-learn inexperience.

Goode’s anxious new guy is a charming lens through which everyone else in the cast introduces the subtly surreal world of Strasse’s comical amplification of coffeehouse co-worker culture. Mystery quickly unveils itself in the course of the employee meeting. A man who worked there had apparently died only to turn-up missing. If that wasn’t weird enough, his disappearance is tied-up in the legend of a sinister drink known only as “The Devil’s Joe.” Naturally the drink in question is going to show-up at the employee meeting which is going to involve death, injuries, missing phones and plot twists

Strasse makes good use of murder mystery conventions in a script that breaks the fourth wall more than a couple of times. Brandon Haut makes a clever appearance as a pizza guy who assumes that the meeting is, in fact, a murder-mystery play rather than an actual crime scene, which allows Strasse to veer-off into subtly post-modernist directions without betraying the overall form of a classic light murder comedy. The weirdness of Strasse’s cafe culture amplification maintains a tight enough hold on basic elements of realism to keep it grounded as a reasonably satisfying mystery. The fact that it manages to do this while holding together the charm of colorful cast in an idiosyncratic comedy is very cool.

Once again...there’s no production company involved here. It’s just a playwright and a bunch of actors she knows having fun with a thoroughly enjoyable script. Strasse and company make it look so easy that it seems very strange that videoconferencing stagings of new scripts aren’t taking place a few times per week. Of course...there’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into something like this, but Strasse and company make it feel like so much fun for everyone involved

Deanna Strasse’s The Cafe Mocha Murders will be performed again one more time September 26 at 7:30 pm on Zoom. For more information, visit the show’s Facebook events page.