![Cast of 'The Game's Afoot' [back row]: Dalton Foose, Kieran Strosser, Cindi Heimberg and Louise Monaco; [front row, seated]: Peyton McCarthy, Deanne Boozer, Scott Carpenter and Marie Baptiste.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/ea2103e/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3678x2519+0+0/resize/840x576!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F55%2Fdd%2F4b94c0c149fe8a238b5f848f5e0a%2Fcast-photo-2.jpg)
Scott Carpenter is a veteran actor. He’s been away from the stage for a few years taking care of his elderly parents.
Cindi Heimberg has taken time off to pursue personal interests.
When Heimberg was cast to play the lead’s mother in Ken Ludwig’s “The Game’s Afoot” at the Belle Theatre, she called Carpenter and told him he had to do the show with her.
“I was so glad that I did because he fits the character perfectly,” said Heimberg.
Carpenter didn’t know anything about the play or the character his friend wanted him to play – William Gillette, a famous Broadway star known worldwide.
“I didn’t realize that the character, William Gillette, was based on a real person that played Sherlock Holmes over 1,300 times onstage,” said Carpenter.
The real Gillette adapted Arthur Conan Doyle’s books for the stage. In the process, he outfitted Holmes in the deerstalker cap, long travelling cloak, magnifying glass and curved briar pipe that became his trademarks.
Gillette also gave the detective his trademark retort, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” which doesn’t appear in any of Doyle’s books.
Gillette made so much money playing Sherlock Holmes that he was able to build a 24-room castle on a cliff overlooking the Connecticut River. That’s where the action in “The Game’s Afoot” takes place.
“He had a lot of tricky things in his house that he built himself,” Carpenter noted. “No two doors were alike in his home. He made them all very specific and had some kind of a mechanical whimsy to them. And he also had seven cats and had cat statues all over the place.”
All the characters in Ludwig’s edge-of-your-seat whodunnit are eccentric. And they’re trapped in Gillette’s castle on Christmas Eve. After one of his guests is stabbed to death, Gillette must channel his inner Sherlock Holmes to solve the crime.
“The Game’s Afoot” is onstage for four final shows this weekend.
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Equal parts breathtaking mystery and high hilarity, Ken Ludwig’s “The Game’s Afoot” tells the story of Broadway star William Gillette, who has invited his fellow cast members to his Connecticut castle for a weekend of revelry. But when one of the guests is stabbed to death, the festivities in this isolated house of tricks and mirrors quickly turn dangerous. Then it’s up to Gillette himself, who just happens to think he’s Sherlock Holmes, to track down the killer before the next victim appears. The danger and laughter are nonstop in this glittering whodunit set during the Christmas holidays.
The cast
The cast of “The Game’s Afoot” follows:
William Gillette: Scott Carpenter
Felix Geisel: Louis Monaco
Simon Bright/Zerlinsky: Dalton Foose
Inspector Harriet Goring: Deanne Boozer
Martha Gillette: Cindi Heimberg
Madge Geisel/Marian: Marie Baptiste
Aggie Wheeler/Alice: Peyton McCarthy
Daria Chase: Kieran Strosser
About Scott Carpenter
Scott Carpenter is an actor and director who lives in Cape Coral.
His stage credits include Buster in “Misery” at Lab Theater, Simon in New Phoenix Theatre’s production of Deborah Laufer’s “The Last Schwartz,” New Phoenix Theatre’s production of “The Full Monty,” “La Cage aux Folles” (New Phoenix Theatre), “It’s Only a Play” (which he also co-directed), Dr. Treves in “The Elephant Man” (Theatre Conspiracy), “Play On!” (Lab Theater), Theatre Conspiracy’s production of Moises Kaufman’s “33 Variations,” Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man” (Lab Theater), Yasmina Reza’s “Art” (Lab Theater), “Cabaret” (Lab Theater), Billy Flynn in “Chicago,” George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Roma in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” He also appeared in the virtual reading being conducted by Lab’s SoDis Theater of Scott Sickles’ “Intellectuals.”
Despite his lengthy resume, Carpenter admitted to experiencing some difficulty in making his return to the stage as Gillette.
“Learning the lines was definitely a challenge, especially with this line load,” said Carpenter. “It took a lot of work to get off book for this show because it's a lot of dialogue and since it’s an ensemble show, everything depends on other people saying their lines correctly.”
In the past, Carpenter wrote his lines down on paper. But for this show, he went tech.
“I turned to an app where after I put in the text, it would produce games like typing in the first letter of lines or fill in the blank or rearranging the lines and I would have to put them in the right order. Just different ways to help get those lines into your head as well as the right verbiage, and I found that that helped a lot.”
Carpenter has directed numerous productions, including “Jekyll & Hyde the Musical” and “Head over Heels” for New Phoenix Theatre, the Florida premiere of the spoof “Death of a Streetcar Named Virginia Woolf: A Parody,” “Rumors” for Lab Theater and “Same Time, Next Year,” “South Pacific,” “Mame” and “Steel Magnolias.”
He appreciates Ludwig’s plays both as an actor and a director.
“He's brilliant at writing comedy and with him it's not so much what's written, it's what you do with those lines and the characters to make the situations funny,” Carpenter explained. “He is very descriptive in the stage directions about the things that he wants, but there's so much more that you can add from there because it is a farce. And I grew up watching 'The Carol Burnett Show,' so this type of a show is like candy for me.”
Carpenter has a B.A. in theater from the William Paterson University and is a member of SAG/AFTA. He is also a recipient of the Cape Coral Community Foundation ENPY award for 2018 Nonprofit Volunteer of the Year Award for his work with Lab Theater.
“One thing I especially like about ‘The Game’s Afoot’ is the way in many parts of the show that Ludwig has the actors break into lines from Shakespeare, which is pretty close to how actors really are,” said Carpenter. “There's several times where we're together and all of a sudden we'll start quoting lines from shows that we've done before, and so, I think he got it right on the nose with how actors are.”
The title of the show comes from Shakespeare – Henry V.
About Cindi Heimberg
Cindi Heimberg is a local actor who has been performing in Southwest Florida since 2010.
Like Carpenter, she’s taken time away from the stage to concentrate on family. She’s also been traveling.
“I have a sick brother-in-law, so we've been trying to spend more family time together,” Heimberg shared.
But she missed performing.
“I love performing. I live to make people laugh. That feeds my soul,” she said. “I would love to make a living making somebody laugh.”
She opted for teaching over standup.
The pay’s better.
Marginally.
Heimberg’s stage credits include Bonnie Schwartz in New Phoenix Theatre’s production of Deborah Laufer’s “The Last Schwartz,” Frau Blucher in “Young Frankenstein,” Ruby in Nancy Stetson’s “Rest Stops of America,” Artistic Director Zorah Bloch in New Phoenix Theatre’s production of Daniel Sullivan’s “Inspecting Carol,” the nursing home administrator in “Marvin’s Room,” “La Cage Aux Folles” at New Phoenix, Lavonda Dupree in Del Shores' black comedy “Sordid Lives,” the neighbor in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane: A Parody of the Horror,” “Play On!,” zany psychic Helga ten Dorp in “Deathtrap,” along with parts in “Rumors,” “Barefoot in the Park,” “Men are Dogs,” “Musical Comedy Murders of the 1940s,” and “Last of the Red-Hot Lovers.”
Many actors concede to experiencing difficulty memorizing lines as they age. Heimberg is among them.
“I find the older I get, the less the memory holds on to things,” she conceded.
But unlike Carpenter, Heimberg resorted to what’s worked for her in the past when it came to memorizing lines.
“I've always had a method where I read through the script a couple of times, and then I type my lines and my cues,” she related. “Then I handwrite the cue on one side of a note card and my line on the other side. And then my mom, God bless her, I'll call her on my planning period or on my way home from work and she'll run lines with me while I'm driving.”
Her husband also pitches in.
Heimberg wasn’t necessarily a Ken Ludwig fan before. She was familiar with “Lend Me a Tenor” and “Moon Over Buffalo,” but she didn’t remember that he’d written those plays.
But she’s definitely a Ken Ludwig fan now.
“I need to get to know him better, because that's my jam. I love comedy,” Heimberg said. “This play is just such a fun, fast-paced whodunit that will keep you guessing until the very end. I'm thrilled that I came back to play Martha Gillette, and I'm blessed to be amongst such talented actors.”
About the real William Gillette
The real William Gillette was an American actor, playwright, and stage director most famous for his stage portrayal of Sherlock Holmes and for the extraordinary stone castle he built on a promontory above the Connecticut River in East Haddam.
Gillette came from a politically progressive family. His father, Senator Francis Gillette, supported reform movements including public education and the abolition of slavery. His mother, Elizabeth Daggett Hooker Gillette, was a direct descendant of Connecticut Colony co-founder Thomas Hooker. The family’s neighbors included Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain.
Gillette traces his interest in theater to his boyhood experience of building a miniature puppet theater, where he entertained friends and family with short plays. In later years, Gillette also credited his Hartford Public High School experiences in English and public speaking with his “natural” style of acting, characterized by a conversational style of delivering his lines that ran contrary to the melodrama articulation that was customary at the time.
Gillette’s first professional role, in 1874, was a small speaking part in his neighbor Mark Twain’s theatrical adaptation of “The Gilded Age,” a novel Twain co-wrote with newspaper editor Charles Dudley Warner. By 1881, theatrical producers Gustave and Daniel Frohman hired Gillette as an actor, director, and playwright; the first play he wrote for them, “The Professor,” enjoyed a 151-performance run in New York and a national tour.
Gillette had a tempestuous relationship with the critics, so he focused instead on pleasing the public. During the 1880s, he experimented with new sound technologies and lighting techniques to enhance the plays he performed in and directed.
In 1882, Gillette married Helen Nichols. They had a happy marriage but she died in 1888 of complications from a burst appendix. The couple had no children, and Gillette never remarried.
Ludwig utilized these events in “The Game’s Afoot,” in the guise of Daria Chase, a sharp-tongued theater critic and psychic medium who stirs up trouble for the group, and Aggie Wheeler, a young ingénue whose love for Gillette goes unrequited.
Gillette’s adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, “Sherlock Holmes,” premiered at the Star Theater in Buffalo, New York, on Oct. 23, 1899, and moved to Manhattan’s Garrick Theater on Nov. 6, 1899. Audiences loved the play and Gillette’s interpretation of the popular detective. Gillette went on to appear in the role of the British sleuth for 33 years, with his final appearance as Holmes occurring on March 19, 1932.
Gillette died on April 29, 1937, in Hartford, Connecticut.
Seventh Sister castle
Gillette made a fortune playing Holmes. With a portion of his earnings, he built a 14,000-square-foot castle on 184 acres overlooking the Connecticut River. He named the edifice Seventh Sister Estates but referred to it as “the pile of rocks.”
Built from Connecticut fieldstone at a cost of $1.1 million in 1919, the medieval gothic castle has 24 rooms, with wooden light switches, roll-away tables, puzzle locks, crafty mirrors and secret doors and passageways that allowed Gillette to spy on his guests (including Albert Einstein and Calvin Coolidge) in order to time dramatic entrances for their amusement.
Electricity was provided by generator before the rest of the town had access. The house had several bathrooms, each with a modern toilet, sink and bathtub, and hot and cold water. Central heating originated from a coal-fired boiler in the basement and provided steam to fill the cast-iron radiators spread around the home.
The hand-carved wooden light switches were meant to resemble levers backstage or operating switches for a railroad. Light fixtures ranged from Gillette’s handmade craft lights and Quezal globes to two made by Tiffany & Co. Gillette designed 47 one-of-a-kind doors within the structure, each having a unique, elaborate latch intricately carved of wood. Pieces of furniture such as the dining-room table and office chair were set on tracks to avoid damaging the floors. A built-in liquor cabinet could be locked by Gillette who then could view it from the second-floor balcony through one of three strategically placed mirrors.
The home also includes a 1,500-square-foot living room, a greenhouse, several guest bedrooms, an art gallery, a library and two tower rooms.
Gillette loved trains since childhood and always wanted to drive one. In 1927, he built a quarter-scale, narrow-gauge railroad around his 184-acre property. The railroad included two engines (one steam, one electric), several passenger cars, and three miles of track complete with bridges, turnarounds and a tunnel. View a 2-minute 1927 newsreel of Gillette’s railroad on YouTube here. (In an era when silent movies were coming to an end, this was one of the earliest "talkies.")
The estate, now called Gillette Castle, is owned and maintained by Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP). As a state park, it hosts approximately 300,000 visitors a year.
There is a railroad station (called “Grand Central”) with a spectacular view of the Connecticut River that used to house Gillette’s railway cars, and the modern walking trails follow much of the old railroad bed. On the grounds, one also will find a covered bridge, a tunnel, several wooden bridges and Gillette’s goldfish pond.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
