After watching three professional plays at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, my wife and I traveled six hours to catch the opening night of Night Must Fall at Olympia Little Theatre. As she drove, we dialed our expectations down. Community theater, including OLT, can and should be inconsistent in quality. That's what any reasonable person expects when unpaid actors, often untrained enthusiasts, assemble to put on a show. I don't want OLT to be OSF, nor do I judge it by the same standards I apply to Capital Playhouse or Harlequin. Those companies pay their actors and charge a lot more. They have training programs, yes, but cast mostly seasoned actors in principal roles. If allowance for scale and ability makes me harsher on companies of veterans, so be it.

Director Pug Bujeaud, however, is no beginner. I expect her to know how to block for three-quarter thrust, and she does. She and Matt Moller designed a beautiful set. The script, first written by Emlyn Williams in 1935 and updated in the '90s, moves along at a satisfying clip. It comes on like a standard whodunit but, along the way, morphs into more of a character study. You'll know who the murderer is long before anybody comes out and says it. Was it Xander Layden's charming sociopath Dan, or any of a handful of seeming red herrings? I found Night similar to J.M. Synge's Gaelic tragicomedy Playboy of the Western World, and not solely because Layden shifts Danny's accent from Welsh to Irish (as Matthew Broderick did on Broadway). Both plays find small-town characters' isolation and sadness driving them into associations they'd ordinarily reject.

Read Christian Carvajal's full review of Night Must Fall in the Stage section at weeklyvolcano.com.

OLYMPIA LITTLE THEATRE, NIGHT MUST FALL, THROUGH NOV. 25, 7:55 PM THURSDAY-SATURDAY, 1:55 P.M. SUNDAY, $10-$14, 1725 MILLER AVE. NE, OLYMPIA, 360.786.9484