Kansas City Actors Theatre presents some of the most harrowing, engaging, and audacious theater you can see anywhere. This raucous group of local artists produces classics and hot new plays, and it provides gifted young professionals the chance to appear in major productions. The 2026-2027 season that was just announced, the company’s 22nd, is one of the most interesting in its history.
It begins as this company’s seasons often do: With a mystery. This time it’s not an adaptation from an Agatha Christie novel, but instead a mystery about Agatha. Heidi Armbruster’s Mrs. Christie (June 17-28) deals in an inventive way with the real-life disappearance of the author in December 1926. Directed by Matt Schwader, it stars Hillary Clemens, Logan Black, Peggy Friesen, Dri Hernaez, Tyler Lindquist, Eric Palmquist, Erdin Schultz-Bever, and Lauren K. Smith.
The playwright said she came upon the subject unexpectedly. “I had always assumed Agatha Christie was for middle schoolers and library basement book clubs—not for real readers,” Heidi said in an interview for Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park earlier this year. Having recently lost her mother, Heidi was grieving, and she didn’t feel in the mood for “smart-people,” books, so she turned to murder mysteries.
“Then I was backstage in New York during a show with a brand-new Kindle that came preloaded with And Then There Were None. I read it in the dark between my entrance at the beginning of the play and the end of the play, and I was completely blown away by the brilliance of it. So, I started down the rabbit hole of Agatha Christie and in a very short amount of time, I had read all 63 of her novels.”
At this moment in her life, Heidi found the author not just comforting but “a really good friend.” (Agatha had also lost her mother, at about the same age Heidi was.) “She’s very loyal, and she makes a contract with her readers: at the beginning she breaks the world, she takes something very ordered and makes it deeply chaotic, but then by the end of the book she puts it back together. She reorders it ingeniously.”
Actors Theatre continues its season with three plays of vital importance. Intimate Apparel is an early hit by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Lynn Nottage. Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is a new play about a too-current topic: vaccination of schoolchildren. And the finale is a rare production of George Bernard Shaw, whose Arms and the Man is an anti-war classic that trades equally on wit and profundity.
Recently Hillary and Matt, two of Actors Theatre’s longtime members (who happen to be married to each other), answered some questions for us about the upcoming productions.
Mrs. Christie
The Independent: When other theater groups want to include a popular play in their season, they throw in a Rent or an Our Town. Actors Theatre produces a light-hearted mystery, often with a British flavor. Why has this become a unique “touch” of your company?
Hillary: It takes particularly good acting and directing to pull off a plot that hinges on revelations. To leave the right storytelling breadcrumbs so precisely and subtly that when the big reveals come, they are not only surprising but intensely satisfying, because they are earned and structurally sound? That’s not easy! Perhaps because as an Ensemble we have a kind of artistic shorthand with one another, KCAT reliably drops those puzzle pieces into place with great skill and great fun. And I think fun is a necessary ingredient when it comes to cooking up a season! Mrs. Christie isn’t a “whodunnit,” but the characters are absolutely trying to solve some very thorny mysteries and grappling with life and death matters, and it’s both delightfully funny and deeply moving.
As an actor, what steps do you take to “become” one of the most revered authors of the last century?
Hillary: A nice thing about playing the undisputed Queen of Crime is that there are a LOT of resources out there for me, including her own mountain of writing! But as an actor, it’s not wise to try to play an icon; I can only approach her the way I would any other character, as a woman with specific desires and obstacles and relationships and circumstances, laid out on the page by Heidi Armbruster. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve definitely done my research, but ultimately my job as an actor is to do all that homework and then set it aside, trusting that it’ll be there supporting the performance without constraining it. I always find that the more personal and specific I am in my work, the more it resonates and connects with audience members.
Heidi has spoken about having just lost her mother when reading Christie and suddenly feeling a kinship to the author’s own loss. What elements of this sadness are found here?
Hillary: Death and loss and pain were a part of Agatha’s own life, are intrinsic to every murder mystery she wrote, and are also at the very heart of Mrs. Christie: along with the question, for Agatha and Lucy and anyone who has experienced grief, of how to keep the pages turning even when real life can’t guarantee a satisfying conclusion in which the detective explains it all.
Matt: One thing that I love about Mrs. Christie specifically is that Heidi Armbruster isn’t adapting a detective story; she’s using the language and structure of mystery to explore very real grief, identity, womanhood, and personal reinvention. The play asks not only “What happened?” but “Who gets to define a woman’s story?” The title itself, Mrs. Christie, immediately makes us think of the public icon, the famous mystery writer history remembers, but it also hints at the expectations placed upon women within marriage and public life. There’s something formal and also strangely anonymous about “Mrs.” It reflects a world in which a woman’s identity is tied to a man, to reputation, performance, and expectations of others.
Heidi’s play pulls us underneath that public image and asks who Agathawas as a human being: frightened, funny, grieving, angry, imaginative, lonely, resilient. The play becomes less about “Agatha Christie the legend” and more about two women trying to author and re-author themselves as they navigate grief, love, expectation, and survival. That tension between the myth we present to the world and the private human being behind the myth really resonates with me.
Intimate Apparel, Eureka Day, Arms and the Man
Kansas City has been lucky enough to see several of Lynn Nottage’s major works (Ruined, Sweat, Clyde’s). Why have these plays have had the impact they’ve had, and where do you believe Nottage stands in world literature, world theater?
Matt: It may seem a bit bold of me to already speak of a relatively young living playwright as one of America’s “greats,” but I truly believe Lynn Nottage’s work will stand the test of time. I have no doubt Intimate Apparel will be produced for generations to come. There’s something remarkable about the way she captures the human experience and lays it bare for an audience. We recognize these people and their circumstances.
Intimate Apparel encompasses so many facets of the American experience at once: women’s lives, the Black experience in the early 1900s, immigration, loneliness, intimacy, class, labor, and a rapidly changing New York during a formative moment in our nation’s history. Her plays are timeless in their compassion, honesty, and humanity. I absolutely believe people will still be producing and studying Lynn Nottage 100 years from now and that Intimate Apparel will go down as an American Classic.
KCAT’s content warning for Eureka Day states that it “includes … discussion of infant mortality.” What steps do you and the author take to make sure this remains a comedy, however dark?
Matt: While difficult topics like child loss and racism arise in Eureka Day, the humor doesn’t come from making light of tragedy itself. The comedy comes from watching deeply passionate people desperately argue for what they believe in. This play feels incredibly topical because it reflects behavior and perspectives we’re all seeing in public life right now. The key with comedy-dramas like this is to let the drama be fully dramatic and let the comedy be comedy.
The actors play people who fight hard for their individual truths, regardless of circumstances. Legendary casting director and author Michael Shurtleff described humor not as joke-telling, but as “a survivor’s way of looking at life.” The actors have to walk a very fine line, and that razor’s edge between sincerity and absurdity is exactly where the audience response lives. I can’t wait for audiences to experience this one!
Why is Shaw so little performed in the United States, and what does his work offer? What are the particular virtues of Arms and the Man?
Matt: I honestly have no idea why Shaw is not produced more often in this country. I’ve never seen or been part of a Shaw production that didn’t ignite conversation afterward. He was a master of a writing style that feels very modern. … Arms and the Man in particular is a wonderfully entertaining exploration of gender roles, romantic idealism, and the absurdity of war itself. The idea that countless lives are sacrificed for the egos and ambitions of a few powerful individuals, who then move on as though nothing of great cost had happened, is, unfortunately, a pattern that never seems to disappear from human civilization. Shaw wraps all of this in wit, charm, and genuine entertainment.
—By Paul Horsley
Mrs. Christie runs June 17th through the 28th at Spencer Theatre, James C. Olson Performing Arts Center, UMKC Conservatory. For tickets go to kcactors.org. To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send an email to paul@kcindependent.com or find him on Facebook (paul.horsley.501) or Twitter/Instagram (@phorsleycritic).
