We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun

Through September 21 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park Street, New Haven. Remaining performances Saturday at 8 & 11 p.m. (203) 432-1566, www.yalecabaret.org

Not the best week, perhaps, to launch a comic mystery with the phrase “Had a Gun” in the title. But I guess if you waited for a week without shootings on the front pages of newspapers you’d be waiting a very long time.

Hmm, maybe We Know Edie La Minx has been waiting a while already. This curious, convulsive and intoxicating entertainment is a murder mystery set in a gay nightclub underworld where the drag queens talk like Brooklyn gangsters from ’40s B-movies. They dance amid projected images from ’60s pop art. The soundtrack references to ’80s pop acts such as the Go-Gos and Patty Smyth.

Oh, and the titular heroine with the Warhol-superstaresque name (played with brusque daintiness by Seth Bodie) does a mean Mae West impression.

The meanness, and the cultural madness, doesn’t stop there. Edie is accused of shooting a lover. The show offers several different scenarios for how this might have happened. These aren’t Rashomon retellings of the same story from different angles. They are whole separate routines: some snarled, some film-noired, some danced divinely.

The mystery, and the emotional monologues it inspires, seems engrossing enough. But what co-writers Kelly Kerwin (who also directs), Helen Jaksch and Emily Zemba truly excel at is using dancefloor pageantry and glamor to propel their narrative without the need for dialogue. The opening and closing full-cast dance numbers are the most compelling parts of this multi-faceted performance.

I’ve seen sexier drag-queen mysteries on the Yale Cabaret stage, but it’s been a long while. This one has a special attitude all its own that transcends desire and exhibitionism and veers inward.

The cast consists of five drag queens, one drag king and “Charlie the piano guy”—Joel Abbott, who accompanies some nicely sung musical numbers. That gay old tradition of lip-synching is kept to a minimum, making room for, at one point, an expert live endition of the Gershwin standard “The Man I Love” (a loaded tune in this context, as it was performed by no less an icon than Liza Minnelli in the film New York, New York, the Scorsese film musical which was partly inspired by a 1947 Raoul Walsh movie called The Man I Love). Here, the song is done by Ato Blankson-Wood, the most convincing and crushworthy of the ladies on view in a play that comes by its provocative nature honestly. It’s sassy and seductive without coming on too strong. It upholds anachronistic stereotypes (at times it plays like 42nd Street) yet avoids the most obvious gay ones. That extends to the audience interaction moments. Nobody’s pulled onto the dancefloor. Instead, upon arriving, audience members are each handed a small envelope with instructions not to open it until told to do so. Is it the answer envelope from a game of Clue? No, it’s an abstraction of a sexual pun. It’s a purposeful, gently engineered mid-show surprise.

We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun empowers yet isn’t afraid to entertain.