The Smell of the Kill

Michele Lowe’s The Smell of the Kill is a nasty, unlikable little comedy about married women taking revenge on their rotten husbands. As its idiotic plot unfolds, audience members may begin to feel that it is easier to get away with murdering your spouse than with writing a mediocre Broadway play.

The problems begin almost at once as the curtain goes up at the Helen Hayes Theatre and we see a kitchen (designed by David Gallo) so immense that we’re not sure if it’s in a house or a restaurant. Even more confusing, it appears that the men (never seen) on the other side of the kitchen door are playing golf. What in the world is supposed to be on the other side of that door? A miniature golf course? Eventually, you come to accept that what is depicted is a very big, expensive suburban house–valued at $1.2 million, if you want to know.

Meanwhile, three women are center stage, talking volumes about the men just beyond our vision. Nicky (Lisa Emery) is raging over her husband’s financial betrayal; he’s been accused of embezzling $7 million and is out on bail. Molly (Jessica Stone), the Goldie Hawn character in the play, is a blonde ditz who soon admits that the constant attention she receives from her husband is downright psychotic. Besides, she wants a baby and her husband won’t sleep with her–which is not to say that she wants for bed partners. Then there’s Debra (Claudia Shear), a woman totally dedicated to her real-estate-broker husband; but we learn at the very beginning of the play that he gropes women left and right, including Nicky that very evening.

These women are friends only insofar as their husbands are college pals who get together once every month on a rotating basis in one of their homes. The women don’t really have anything in common except a growing disdain for their spouses and a desire to share their feelings. While their husbands carouse, the women are expected to prepare their dessert–or, perhaps their just desserts? Playwright Lowe contrives (and we don’t use that word loosely) to accidentally trap the husbands in a fancy new meat locker in the basement. As the men pound on the walls, alerting the wives upstairs to their potentially lethal predicament, the bitch-and-moan session in the kitchen suddenly takes on a new, expectant air. Should the women free their husbands or let them freeze to death?

The fantasy of killing one’s spouse is hardly a new comic idea; consider, for example, the 1965 Jack Lemmon-Virna Lisi movie How to Murder Your Wife. Of course, if a film like that were made today, the PC police would swoop down on it like avenging angels. But, ironically, it’s perfectly okay now to produce a play about killing husbands. The only problem is that the female characters in The Smell of the Kill are essentially no better than their unseen male counterparts. Two of the three women, in fact, seem as spoiled and selfish as their husbands. Why should we root for them to get away with murder? Why can’t we simply get away, ourselves? Ah…no intermission. Trapped!

To give the production its due, Christopher Ashley directs with energy and pace and the three actresses give bright performances. Emery’s anger is palpable from the beginning as she bites into her lines with a malevolent gusto. Within the confines of her ditzy role, Stone mines considerable laughter thanks to excellent comic timing and an inspired use of her vocal range. But, finally, it is Shear’s performance that really stands out because it’s the only one that isn’t a caricature. To her credit, the actress manages to keep the character rooted in reality for the better part of the play.

Had the author written three such roles, The Smell of the Kill might not be so malodorous. As it is, the laughs–and the play does have its fair share of clever lines–are in the service of a cheap plot wherein nothing is truly at stake. If we felt that the women were genuine and that the decision to murder their husbands was arrived at with more trepidation, the humor would have been deeper and the play would have been much more satisfying.