Twins shoot it out in Paradise play

There was a shooting and a case of poisoning in Paradise last weekend - two people died, but no one was arrested. The sheriff turned in the badge and ran off with a private detective.

It was all part of "Blazing Guns at Roaring Gulch" put on by the Paradise Players and hosted by the Paradise Center. Nine actors, directed by Mary Lou Hermes, gave three shows of the two-hour melodrama Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. Susannah Lindsay, the stage manager, prompted the audience with her signs to boo, hiss, yea, and rah, but she didn't need to prompt the laughs.

The play was set in the Roaring Gulch Hotel in the old western town of Lame Duck, Montana, where the owner, Widow Black, played by Sharon Murray, and her stepson, Barney Black (Andy Gonzalez), get a visit from the bad guy, Snipe Vermin (Michael Murray), and his partner, Bill Filbert (Ben Winkler). On the trail of Vermin is a Pinkerton detective, Harry Heartstone, also played by Murray. One twist was that Heartstone and Vermin are identical twins and Vermin doesn't know the detective is his brother.

Vermin wounds his brother and teams up with Widow Black to rob the bank and blame it on the detective. He even fools Sheriff Willie Lovelace, (Nora Verpoorten), who is fond of Heartstone. Meanwhile, Widow Black tries to poison her stepson, who found a will that leaves him as the rightful hotel owner. However, the plan backfires and she ends up drinking the poison herself. At the same time, the hotel gets three more visitors, actors Colonel Crabtree (Mike Thompson), Flora Flambeau (Rochelle Lukehart) and Dora Duncan (Myra Lindbergh), who run into their former fellow actor Martha Muldoon (Kathleen Hubka), who rejoins the group. In the end, the Pinkerton detective shoots his bad boy brother and walks off with Lovelace.

Forty people attended Friday night's two-hour performance, which ended with a loud applause for the nine cast members and the 14-year-old Lindsay, who got a big laugh when toward the end she had to remind the cast that telephones and 911 doesn't exist in this time period. Lindsay was also one of three people who performed during intermission with a skit called "Dad Jokes 101." Only 30 people showed for the Saturday night performance, but 54 people attended Sunday afternoon's final showing.

"I was very happy with all the performances, especially the last one. An appreciative responsive audience helped as well," said Hermes, who has put on nearly a dozen plays at the Paradise Center and directed plays at Plains High School in the 1970s. Cast members had been rehearsing for six weeks.

Nearly all of them have performed with the Paradise Players before. New this time was Rochelle Lukehart, who moved to Plains from California last year and heard about the Paradise Players in Plainly Speaking Toastmasters Club.

Hermes calls her group of actors a "geriatric" troupe because most are in their 60s and 70s. The youngest on stage last week was Winkler, 33, who has been with the Paradise Players for three plays. It was his mother, the late Ruth Winkler, who established the Paradise Players numerous years ago mainly to put on children's plays at Paradise Grade School, although she did some with a mixture of kids and adults, said Hermes.

"They were great. And the Paradise Players don't make anything on this. They do it to benefit the Paradise Center," said Karen Thorson, a board member of the Paradise Elementary School Preservation Committee, the nonprofit organization responsible for the center. "We are always looking for and welcoming new actors," said Hermes. "We really can't do another evening of one act plays again until we get a troupe big enough so that the same people don't have to be in all three, like we did the last time we tried one act plays," she added.

Hermes was especially pleased with Murray, who has been in nearly all her Paradise Center plays. "The leading man, Michael Murray,  is a very, very talented actor, who, he said, ran away to Hollywood when he was young," she said. Murray has played a villain in several plays and likes being the bad guy.

"I think it's easy and I get to ham it up," said the 74-year-old Murray, who acted in around 30 plays in California, including as an extra in the movie "A Fine Mess." He's directed two plays at the Paradise Center, but said he has more fun acting. "One of the axioms of theater is if the cast is having fun, the audience reacts to that and has fun," he said.

Murray wasn't the only veteran actor. Myra Lindborg worked with the Bigfork Community Players for more than 20 years, according to Hermes. "They're a great group of people who have fun putting on pretty darned good performances," said Hermes, who added that most of the cast went to second hand stores and purchased their own costumes for the play. "We've had a lot of fun together and they're the kind of people that can pick it up and run with it when the lines get screwed up," said Hermes.

Intermission was also entertaining. In addition to Lindsay, Butch Murdock of Plains sang and Jean Nemeth of Camas Prairie played the harmonica. Lindsay has performed in church plays and in two Missoula Children's Theatre productions at Plains School. Hermes hopes to have a part for her in the next play, which she said will take pace in the spring. Nemeth and Murdock also did an impromptu performance before the show on Sunday. Murdock got big laughs when acting tipsy while singing the drunk version of  "Hello Walls."

Hermes is already planning another melodrama for April or May, but would like to add young actors to the group. "We do this for the fun of it and give the money to the center. I hope that we'll get drama so imbedded here that people will call for it even after I'm too old."