The Tangled Skirt: The Heart of Noir

This article is part of September Mystery Month, in honor of the birthday of Agatha Christie on September 15th. Throughout the month, we’ll highlight some of the many mysteries in our catalogue.

Here, playwright Steve Braunstein discusses his two-person suspense thriller The Tangled Skirt (US/UK).

Schemers. Dreamers. Hucksters. Hustlers. Swindlers. Killers. Lovers and Losers.

These are the people who populate the Noirish universe of my plays. Those who dwell in the shadows, drift on the outskirts of town and hover in the narrow, rainslick corridors of desire and dread. These are people who wish they had a dysfunctional family with whom to bicker over a lavish holiday feast, or highminded intellectual friends with whom to debate the latest cultural or political trends and clashes while drinking only the finest wines.

No. The people I write about have other concerns. Personal concerns. Urgent concerns. Life and death concerns. These are characters living right on the edge… flirting with sin. One false move, one wrong turn – well, no foxhole conversion to religion will save them. For some people… it’s just too late.

In my new play, The Tangled Skirt (US/UK), two such people chance to meet at a deserted, small-town bus depot in the dead of night. While they appear to be strangers, they are, like many Noir characters, inexorably linked by ominous secrets, perilous yearnings, and a series of dire machinations that can only lead to trouble – or things much worse.

People have asked me over the years why I “dabble in the dark” with dangerous characters who seem to exist in a neon-lit world, so distant from the lives of the typical theatregoer. My answer is simple. These dangerous, driven characters are, in reality, not so alien from that theatregoer – or anyone else, for that matter. In my Author’s Notes for The Tangled Skirt, I state that the two characters, Bailey Bryce and Rhonda Claire, ensnared in the sticky web of crime and lies, are “not so different from you and me.” In fact, countless theatregoers in audience talkbacks have stated, with a sense of tingly delight, that they absolutely related to these fraught characters onstage.

How could this be? Are these audiences made up of thieves and murderers? Hopefully not. But at the heart of Noir are people catapulted by passion and need. That’s the connecting point. Who can truly say that they have never considered, even for a flash, doing something a bit mad to attain that out-of reach object of desire? Be it a person, be it money, be it whatever it is that replaces dreams on sleepless nights. The difference between the fictional people onstage and the real people in the audience is that the stage characters in The Tangled Skirt – and other Mystery Noirs – act, almost always unwisely, on their torrid impulses in ways that, perhaps, a more rational person would not

Still, what makes a good Mystery Thriller tick are characters that can ally an audience with their aching, breathless, hard-boiled desires. “Yeah, I can maybe see myself doing that, but… of course, I’d never go that far. I mean, that guy’s crazy, right?”

Maybe. Yet, every day of the week, every night of the year, somebody, somewhere, for love or money or both, does that one crazy thing – igniting a real life Noir: living in hiding, fleeing in the night, dodging doom one siren at a time, knowing escape is as fleeting as faith, as unlikely as wealth, as tricky as love, and as unreal as the wildest dreams that started this twisty journey in the first place.

Yeah. There’s a little bit of darkness in every heart. Because every heart is a little bit broken, or is going to be someday. All of us out there are a mystery unto ourselves. We’re all made up of many puzzle pieces. But at least one of those pieces is missing in each of us. That desperate cause to be whole, to find that piece, well, it drives some more than others. And the ones willing to do anything to seize that elusive piece of their lives… they make the best stories.

In The Tangled Skirt, both Bailey Bryce and Rhonda Claire are seeking that unattainable something. And they both know they will have to do the unthinkable to get the unattainable. In the pulsing world of Noir, the unthinkable is just a shot away. And right there, in the hazy, smoky swirl of the shots, the slaps, the scams and the screeching tires…are the kisses. The most deadly weapons in the entire history of storytelling. There’s always a woman ready to make a sucker out of a man to get that something she’s craving to possess. And there’s no shortage of men willing to be that sucker – even if they live to regret it. Or die before they know what hit them.

That’s life in the big town. Sure. And in small towns too. That’s why there’s always an audience for a good mystery. Besides the sheer kick of it, life is a mystery, after all. And, in the end, the only thing that really separates the characters onstage with the audiences glued to these suspense thrillers is the curtain that goes up when the play begins, and down when it ends.

But when the play is over, the mystery doesn’t truly end. Out in the parking lots and train stations, the side streets and back alleys, there are human dramas playing out, nonstop.

That Night Beat.

Who’s going to be the next story in the real-life Noir in which we all dwell?

To license a production of The Tangled Skirt, visit Concord Theatricals in the US or UK.