New Agatha Christie mystery in San Jose is not your average Agatha Christie mystery

Heidi Armbruster's "Mrs. Christie" explores the famed mystery writer's still-unexplained 11-day disappearance.

It’s been a little over a hundred years since Agatha Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920 with the first of her detective novels, introducing her eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Over the years her “cozy” mysteries have been much imitated, sometimes lampooned or reacted against by later waves of mystery writers, but they’ve also remained wildly popular.

Guinness World Records names Christie the world’s best-selling fiction writer ever. Her stage murder mystery “The Mousetrap” is the world’s longest-running play, showing continuously on London’s West End since 1952 (a 14-month COVID shutdown notwithstanding).

And adaptations of her work just keep on coming. “A Haunting in Venice” is currently in cinemas, director/star Kenneth Branagh’s third movie based on Christie’s Poirot mysteries.

Now TheatreWorks Silicon Valley brings us “Mrs. Christie,” Heidi Armbruster’s play about an actual mystery in Agatha Christie’s own life — her still-unexplained 11-day disappearance that made headlines and sparked a mammoth search for her in 1926.

Armbruster playfully juxtaposes scenes of Christie in the 1920s with a present-day Agatha Christie fan searching for the author’s lost writings, with famous Christie characters such as Poirot and Mrs. Marple wandering in and out of the action.

“I’ve always been a fan of mysteries, and I went through a period of time right after my mother passed away where I was really craving something that you could pick up and put down,” Armbruster says. “I felt like I didn’t have enough attention span for quote-unquote ‘smart’ stuff. I had been aware of Agatha Christie since I was a kid, but I had really dismissed it as something that was for middle school students.”

A graduate of American Conservatory Theater’s MFA program in San Francisco, Armbruster is also a well-known actor in New York and in regional theater, as well as in film and television.

“I was doing a play where I had to make an entrance at the beginning, and then I had to wait backstage until the end to make my second entrance,” she recalls. “There was no way to get from the backstage to the dressing room, so I had to sit in the dark for 45 minutes. I had just gotten an e-reader, and one of the Agatha Christie novels came preloaded on that e-reader. So I read it and I was like, oh my God, this is actually kind of great. It’s accessible. It’s plot driven. It’s funny. And it has this incredibly satisfying solution. You put yourself in the hands of a really good writer, and you know that at the end there will be a solution that reorders the world in a really compelling, satisfying way. I think more than anything, that idea of reordering chaos was something that felt really comforting to me at that moment of chaos in my own personal life.”

After this serendipitous reintroduction, Armbruster was inspired to do a deep dive into Christie’s life and writings, and the personal resonance for her only increased.

“I was about 37 years old,” Armbruster says. “When Agatha Christie was 37, she had lost her mother and was in this moment of despair that preceded her 11-day disappearance. And I was looking at my own despair and my own grief and my own age and thinking, what’s the cosmic thread here?  She’s 37, she’s married to a guy who was a World War I fighter pilot. Now he’s working a corporate job. They’ve moved out to the suburbs, he’s golfing a lot, he’s sleeping with a younger woman, and he wants a divorce. And she puts herself away for those 11 days. My idea is that’s the place where she metamorphoses. She walks out of that hotel room, she gives her husband his divorce, and she goes on to become Agatha Christie.”

Giovanna Sardelli, the new artistic director of TheatreWorks and its director of new works since 2014, directed the world premiere of “Mrs. Christie” in 2019 at Vermont’s Dorset Theatre Festival. Four eventful years later, she’s staging the play’s second production to open her company’s 53rd season. It’s the company’s first production since she took the helm in July, when erstwhile artistic director Tim Bond left to head the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the first since the company announced a crucial fundraising campaign to save TheatreWorks that runs through November.

“She really was writing outside of her time, and she gave up a lot to become Agatha Christie,” Sardelli reflects. “Her marriage disintegrated. She had worked in the dispensary in World War I. She lived through a global pandemic, like us. And so she wrote, as Heidi posits, in some ways as a relief from the grief — to order her own chaos, to order her own life. That’s why, when I revisited it after having lived through a global pandemic, I really resonated with what Agatha Christie was doing, more than I had the first go-round. In her writing, there is pain. And in her writing, there’s satisfaction because mystery is always solved, and order is restored.”

“There’s something about this moment emerging from the pandemic, a different kind of universal acknowledgement of grief,” Armbruster agrees. “And also I think something about craving theatricality or craving fun, craving enjoyment, as an antidote to being shut up in our houses. I think the play has actually become more relevant with the passing of time and the recent pandemic moment that we were all thrust into, in our own little chrysalis.”

“I think there’s a reason murder mystery things are selling so well right now,” Sardelli adds. “I think people just need a little order brought to the chaos of the world we’re in.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘MRS. CHRISTIE’

By Heidi Armbruster, presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

Through: Oct 29

Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View

Tickets: $27-$100 (subject to change); 877-662-8978, www.theatreworks.org