Review: BISTANY'S MYSTERIES Choose-Your-Own Murder Mystery Comedy at ImprovBoston

Self proclaimed "famed novelist," Matthew Bistany is out of ideas.

When the author greeted the audience at the top of Bistany's Mysteries he explained that when he sat down to give us his latest novel, he realized suddenly he was staring at a partially blank page. Panicked as opening night quickly approached, Mr. Bistany had a brilliant idea: let the audience come up with the rest of the story. What resulted is an improvised comedic murder mystery hosted and guided by the author himself.

The staged novel/improv show/impromptu musical begins with the stuff the author created. Exposition. The setting is an intergalactic spaceship far enough into the future where the threat of electromagnetic fields and mind reading are so real that everything must be covered in tin foil. The author also gives us the introduction of a plot and characters as we meet a space Captain, his extraterrestrial wife, pouty daughter, and adopted son moving into a new spaceship. The family is accompanied by their italian chauffeur, a mechanic aspiring to become a space lumberjack, a space mercenary and a show stealing all-in-one robot.

To get the murder mystery started, Mr. Bystany solicits the audience to come up with a murder weapon and a location of the death. Space frisbee and kitchen, an obvious choice, was thrown out and instantly put into the novel. The story dives directly into the discovery of the body. But questions like "who" and "why" are unanswered and is now the job of the author and cast to come up with a long form improvised story explaining, in detail, how the murder developed.

What resulted on stage, which sounds more like an intergalactic soap opera than murder mystery, is that the space Captain turns out to be a jerk. This fuels marital problems. The son laments after recently discovering his adopted past. The daughter falls for the mechanic. The space mercenary reveals his predilection with Keurigs and almost takes the robot to his bed. This farcical plot takes sharp twists and turns into the inscrutable dimensions of deep space.

Plot is meant to play as a pencil thin thread to tie everything together. The true conceit of the story was for the author to stop the action and request the audience to suggest something new. These changes derailed the progress and forced the entire cast to jump on a new path. Left was a long form Improv show to develop at the hands of the cast. This puts a lot of weight on the cast to keep the show afloat and with a few exceptions, most scenes never get the story from point A to Point B- something important when we are trying to determine "whodunnit." The final scene, which showed the murder, only created additional questions and confusion.

Bistany's Mysteries just ended a three performance run where each show was a different story (the image below is from the Victorian Themed Show). Matthew Bistany has a great kernel of an idea in a choose-your-own improv murder mystery. I look forward to further development of a plot structure and subsequent incarnations of his work.

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