The Kravis Center has been understandably dark for the past 14 months, shuttered by the indoor social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If only it could find a show that fits the current health and safety criteria, the West Palm Beach arts complex could open its doors again.
Maybe “open its doors” is the wrong term, for the center’s first glimmer of activity is an audience interactive production, Art Heist Experience, performed entirely outside on the Kravis grounds.
It comes from Right Angle Entertainment, a Canadian company that devised this low-key sleuthing exercise based on the real-life 1990 robbery at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum – a case involving $500 million in stolen paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet, still unsolved after 31 years.
Various would-be FBI operatives guide the newly deputized security agents (aka the audience) on a 90-minute trek to interrogate the four known suspects in the case. Beginning at the Rinker Playhouse lobby, we marched to the Kravis loading dock, stage door driveway, through the valet parking garage to the newly renovated main entrance of the center. If nothing else, the intrepid amateur investigators were led through areas of the complex they probably had never seen before.
Groups of a maximum of 30 participants begin the Experience every half-hour, beginning at 5:30 p.m., So each evening, there are four separate performances, and eight in all on matinee days.
Unlike every other Kravis performance, where the audience is implored to shut off their cellphones, in Art Heist Experience your phone supplies additional clues to the eventual “solution.” It is a cool high-tech twist to the production, but in practice, with so many participants either phoneless or unable to open the dedicated website, the FBI guides had to recite the electronic clues.
Four gender-unspecific performers play the quartet of reality-based suspects. There’s Rick Abath (Amy Eileen Mahon), a Gardner security guard found trussed up in the basement of the museum the morning after the heist. David Turner (Troy Stanley), a career criminal convicted of a different caper, whose sentence was curiously reduced, perhaps for offering inside information about the Gardner case.
Then there’s con man Brian McDevitt (Sara Grant), who planned a similar heist in New York state before fleeing to South America and possibly dying of AIDS in 2004. And lastly, Myles Connor Jr., (Jeremy Quinn), self-proclaimed “greatest art thief in the world,” who orchestrated crimes from behind bars.
Each suspect offers the group his/her insights/alibi for the Gardner case, but the bulk of the show hinges on their interrogation by the amateur deputies. Efforts are made to trip them up, but they mostly have prepared answers for the obvious questions or simply deflect the ones that stump them. Of the suspects, Stanley and Quinn were particularly adept at embellishing their biographical histories and coming up with snappy in-character retorts.
Ultimately, however, Art Heist Experience gets stuck without a satisfying conclusion. Since the Gardner case remains unsolved, the show cannot end on a definitive “Aha!” moment. We are asked to vote for the suspect who we believe is most guilty, and while there was a clear “winner” at the performance I attended, for all we know the real culprit remains on the loose.
ART HEIST EXPERIENCE, Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Now through May 16. Beginning at 5:30 pm on weekdays, 2:00 pm on weekends. $41.50-$46.50. 561-832-7469 or at Kravis.org/artheist.