Playwright Heidi Armbruster on Mrs. Christie
Wisconsin native Heidi Armbruster will be familiar to Milwaukee Rep audiences from onstage roles in the World Premiere of Wife of a Salesman and the Tony Award-winning dark comedy God of Carnage. We are thrilled to welcome her back – this time as the acclaimed playwright of Mrs. Christie – an effervescent, charming new comedy inspired by the real-life case of "The Missing Mrs. Christie," when Agatha Christie went unexpectedly missing for 11 days without explanation.
In this interview, director Joanie Schulz sits down with Heidi to discuss all things Agatha and how she came to see mystery's most famous writer as “a really good friend” in trying times.
Joanie: I’d love to start by asking where this play came from.
Heidi: My mom died. I was grieving, and I’m a big reader, but I didn’t feel like in the aftermath of my mother’s passing I had the bandwidth for reading “smart-people books.” So, I went back to murder mysteries. And I had always assumed Agatha Christie was for middle schoolers and library basement book clubs — not for real readers. And I read around her a lot. I read Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham — the Golden Age writers. But then I was backstage in New York during a show with a brand-new Kindle that came preloaded with And Then There Were None. I read it in the dark backstage between my entrance at the beginning of the play and the end of the play, and I was completely blown away by the brilliance of it. So, I started down the rabbit hole of Agatha Christie and in a very short amount of time I had read all 63 of her novels.
At that moment in my life — crawling out of a life-altering loss and the grief that came after that — I found Agatha Christie to be a really good friend. She’s very loyal, and she makes a contract with her readers: at the beginning she breaks the world, she takes something very ordered and makes it deeply chaotic, but then by the end of the book she puts it back together. She reorders it ingeniously. Her novels are very accessible, funny, plot driven, and they’re page turners. There’s a little bit of social commentary, so they don’t feel too saccharin. I just found the puzzle plot of it very comforting. In and around that I became aware of her biography. She had also lost her mother around the same age I was, and I became aware of the disappearance. That’s when I started writing the play. Processing my own grief by way of exploring Agatha Christie’s grief.
Joanie: Why do you think we tend to categorize her as “lesser” literature? Is there judgement because they are accessible?
Heidi: Or because she’s a woman? Or because women like them? The “Notebook Guy” has a new book about puzzle plotting, and in it he makes an argument that suddenly in the 1920s people had leisure time. Board games became popular; people were listening to radio dramas. In these books, there is a murder game the reader is engaged in. So, is it because it’s a game for bored housewives who now have appliances and don’t spend all day every day trying to feed and clothe their families?
Joanie: There’s also a tendency to dismiss work that’s popular. Her books have been translated into countless languages. She’s one of the most widely published authors in history.
Heidi: That doesn’t happen by accident.
Joanie: This play spans a hundred years, moving between 1926 and 2026. What does Lucy offer contemporary audiences?
Heidi: Lucy is an everywoman. She’s stuck in a job that doesn’t light her up. She’s hit some walls and feels her life is at a dead end, and she finds escape and comfort in Agatha Christie’s puzzles. In other words, Lucy is diametrically opposite from Agatha. So, what can these two connect on over the space of their differences and the hundred years? Anyone who has experienced grief or chaos recognizes it in others immediately, regard-less of era or circumstance. That fragility is universal.
Joanie: And then there’s Agatha Christie…
Heidi: When we think of Agatha Christie, we think of an icon, this rich British Dame — but at thirty-seven, she not the figure that we think of her as yet. She’d only just written The Murder of Roger Akroyd, which would have still cemented her place in the pantheon, but she wasn’t who we know her as today. She’s in a fragile place in her life. There’s also a tension in the play between Agatha’s public mask and her private self. I’m interested in the idea that the work and the woman are inseparable. Her secrets, her shame, her reinvention — those things don’t exist apart from the books. They fuel them. Learning about her life gave me a deeper appreciation for her work. Americans, especially, love a reinvention story. Christie’s life is a chrysalis story as much as it is a mystery.
Joanie: What does Christie mean to you personally?
Heidi: Permission. Permission to transform in middle age. To do something new. Permission to chart a new course that wasn’t written in your high school yearbook. She kept evolving — through her forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. That’s incredibly inspiring to me.
Reprinted with permission by Cincinatti Playhouse in the Park and lightly edited for clarity.