INTERVIEW: New show ‘Three Can Keep a Secret’ puts the audience in control
Photo: Three Can Keep a Secret, written by Gregory Crafts, continues through Sunday, April 20, at the New York City Fringe Festival. Crafts, left, plays Moose in the show, while Ryan Dylan Wargnier plays Sonny. Photo courtesy of Olivia Haas / Provided by Gregory Crafts with permission.
Audience participation reaches new levels in Three Can Keep a Secret, a new play now running at the New York City Fringe Festival. Performances continue at wild project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan through Sunday, April 20.
In the murder-mystery show, which features a storyline that wouldn’t be out of place in a mafia crime thriller, the audience is able to determine the major plot points and how the narrative proceeds. This means each performance is entirely unique, and no one — including the cast and crew — knows what will happen next. The only constants are the two main characters: Moose, played by Gregory Crafts, who also wrote the piece, and Sonny, played by Ryan Dylan Wargnier. Richard Piatt directs the show.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Crafts about the new piece. He’s best known for Friends Like These and Super Sidekick: The Musical. He opens up about the Hollywood performances that began this journey and the Edinburgh shows that are coming this summer. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
Where did the inspiration for Three Can Keep a Secret come from?
Excellent question! The impetus for Three Can Keep a Secret came to me while I was actually trying to turn one of my 10-minute plays about surviving a zombie apocalypse into an hour-long interactive show and was struggling with fleshing (heh) it out. Back then, I was driving for Uber and Lyft for my primary income, so I had a lot of time on my hands while I sat in my car waiting for rides. Well, one Saturday, I drove for 12 hours straight, and between rides I kept trying to make the outline work for the zombie play. However, inspiration was just not coming. But then, at one point I had the thought: “Well, what if I tried this structure with a different story?” And over the course of that day, the general plot of Three Can Keep a Secret revealed itself to me.
Soon after I had the idea, I was invited to participate in a weekly late-night theatre series at my company called Play/Time: Serial Edition, where each week, a group of writers would develop a new play over the course of a month, and each week we’d be tasked with presenting the next 10-15 minute installment of our individual storylines. Every other writer got their episodes done weeks in advance of the show. But me? I had to be extra. I wrote each new episode the day it was due. I had to do it this way because of the audience participation element. At the end of each episode there was a cliffhanger, and the audience was given a choice between two options. Whatever they picked, that’s the scene I wrote, and that’s what went up the next week. This led to some tight turnarounds, but we got it done, and it was very well-received!
Once that run was over, I went back and filled in the other options, and we brought the completed show to the Hollywood Fringe Festival the next year. All of those original workshop episodes are up on YouTube, btw. You can also watch them at ThreeCanKeepASecretPlay.com. I have to say, it’s a very different show now.
How challenging / exciting is it to have the audience choose the direction of the play?
Giving the audience the power of choice over what happens next certainly keeps us on our toes! It’s tricky preparing for each performance knowing in our pre-show that we’re going over choreography that may not be seen, setting props that may not be used and running dialogue that may not be performed based on the audience’s choices. But that’s the nature of the show! We’ve got to be ready for anything. All told, between all of the different options, there are 26 different iterations of the show that could play out on any given night. That’s a lot to keep straight.
And boy, has New York really kept us working overtime. Over the course of the first two performances of our run here at NYC Fringe, our audiences have made completely different choices, meaning they saw two very different stories play out from night to night. What was really cool was how audience members that were at our opening came back for our second performance just so they could vote for other choices and see how they played out. Those folks managed to sway the vote and got a real treat for their efforts.
How would you describe the characters of Moose and Sonny?
If you’ve ever watched a show like The Sopranos or movies like Casino or Goodfellas, you’ve seen these guys. They’re not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, and they’re not the friendliest guys. Heck, it’s obvious at times that they don’t even like each other very much. But they both like easy money, and common interest can make for strange bedfellows.
So a little about Moose: Built like a brick shithouse, this former Golden Gloves Boxing champion has a no-show job at a mafia-owned club in Las Vegas, and instead spends his nights collecting debts and breaking legs for his bosses. Moose is deeply in love with Denise, completely unaware of the fact that her “embittered housewife” persona is an act she uses to seduce various one-night stands with her husband Mason’s full knowledge and enthusiastic consent. When Moose learns of Mason’s debt to his bosses, he hatches a scheme to whack Mason, take the money, and, like a knight in shining armor, sweep Denise off her feet and ride off with her into the sunset. Little does he know just how wrong he is about almost everything he thinks he knows about his lover and her husband.
As for Sonny, he’s the wild card. The Mutt to Moose’s Jeff in this evening’s events, Sonny is a thrill-seeking loose cannon, and one that’s not afraid to get blood on his hands for the right price. When Moose approached him with the idea to rob their bosses by intercepting Mason’s debt service, he signed on the moment he learns he’d get to kill a man, and insisted on doing it personally. Being the furthest removed from the chain of events that led up to tonight’s happenings, he’s got the least to lose out of anyone there, which makes him the most dangerous.
What’s next for the production after the New York City Fringe Festival?
I’m excited to say that after NYC Fringe, we’re taking the production to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe! We’ll be performing at theSpace on the Mile Aug. 3-9. Before we leave for the UK, we have a two-performance tune-up run booked at the Electric Lodge in Venice, California, as part of The StageCrafts Freeway Circuit, a theatrical mini-touring circuit for small productions. Once we’re back from L.A., we’ll probably book a few more performances on the circuit, stopping in cities like Inglewood, Long Beach and Pasadena.
As part of our time in Scotland, we’ll be shopping the show around to touring companies and producers from around the world. It would be a dream come true to be offered a run in the West End, off-Broadway or even a major regional theater. I’ve also sent this script to both of my publishers (I have plays published with both Concord Theatrical and Broadway Licensing), and they’re both considering the show for inclusion in their catalogs.
Oh, and we’re planning on shooting the movie in the fall, and we’ll do a festival circuit run with that once it’s ready. Whatever it takes to get the story out there! Basically, we’re kind of shooting for the moon here and seeing what happens.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Three Can Keep a Secret, written by and starring Gregory Crafts, continues through Sunday, April 20, at wild project as part of the New York City Fringe Festival. Click here for more information and tickets.
