Six professional assassins enter a bar, there to honor the passing of fellow assassin Bartleby who is laid out in a coffin on the premises.
This is the world premiere of Seven Assassins Walk into a Bar, a one-act, 80-minute play written and directed by actor, playwright, director and university professor Dain Geist about to go on stage at Main Street Theater. The title alone which sounds like a set up for a joke, leads us into a dark comedy.
“The play is about a group of professional assassins who get together to mourn the passing of a colleague. And as they are drinking and commiserating the death of this colleague they are swapping stories and reminiscing and complaining about their job and debating the ethical quandaries of their profession,” Geist says..
“Something that’s said at the very beginning of the play is you’re going to have six armed assassins with six different sets of problems in the same room together. These are all professionals in the same room together who all kind of know each other and they don’t all like each other.
“So there are arguments that happen. The only difference is instead of one Chekhov’s gun I’ve got like six or seven.”
Geist, who teaches drama at Sam Houston State University has written and directed other plays before but describes himself as primarily an actor. He got the idea for this play from two different sources, he says.
“Back in 2017 and 18 I saw two different plays. I saw Ten Ways On a Gun over at Landing and I saw Evening at the Talk House over at Catastrophic. One involved a timeshare with a handgun and the other a bar with a bunch of friends. I got the idea of a bunch of actors getting together after a show and having conversations and talking but instead of actors — assassins.
Initially it was a 10-20 minute play that he stuck in a drawer. During the pandemic he finally found a draft he liked and did two Zoom readings which helped him polish the script.
The cast includes Callina Anderson, Dwight Clark, Brad Goertz, Kara Greenberg, Christianne Mays, Seth Carter Ramsey and Saroa-Dwayne Sasa. Torsten Louisis the set designer, Macy Lyne the costume designe, Eric L. Marsh designed the lighting. The sound designer is Jon Harvey, props design and set dressing are by Rodney Walsworth and Emma Bacon is the production stage manager.
There is the sound of gunfire in the show and Geist wants to assure potential audience members that there is no chance of live rounds mistakenly being loaded and discharged during a show. “There is simulated gunfire and all of the weaponry are non-firing,” Geist says. “These are non-firing replicas that literally cannot fire anything.
“What’s fun about it — the audience is not stupid. The audience knows something is going to happen. — they know we hired an actor to put into a coffin. So there’s a lot of anticipation, there’s a lot of threat of violence as opposed to the actual violence. When I’m watching an action film, I find the action the least interesting. It’s all the lead-up. It’s all the posturing.
“It is a dark comedy/ There’s a lot of macabre humor that takes place as these folks are sitting there complaining about the best place to dispose of a body and how they feel about dating other assassins.
“I want people to walk away from this thing thinking if I were a professional, which one of these assassins would I most emulate,” Geist says. “If I have done my job well, people will both like and despise each one of them for different reasons.”
Performances are scheduled for February 8 through March 2 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. on February 23 and March 2 and 3 p.m. Sundays at MST-Rice Village, 2540 Times Boulevard. For more information, call 713-524-6706 or visit mainstreettheater.com. $40-$63.
