Crimora Players will perform “An Inconvenient Corpse” November 22 to 24, 2024 at the Crimora Community Center.
“We make it a lot funnier than [it’s written],” said Carla Coffey, who portrays lead character “Dolly Manfred,” the woman’s club president.
The club meets regularly at the courthouse, but one day the guest of honor eats pasta salad and ends up dead at the potluck lunch.
To make matters worse, the guest of honor is supposed to be grand marshal of the Founder’s Day parade that same day.
In the process of hiding the corpse and finding out what happened, town characters interrupt the meeting, including the town mayor, the town soothsayer and a newspaper reporter.
According to Irene Cash, founder of Crimora Players, the theater group performed the production several years ago.
Coffey said the production is a challenge for the actors because at times on stage several different conversations happen at the same time.
“The play has a lot of conversation that nothing brings you into it,” Cash said.
The advantage of multiple actors on stage at once, however, is that each character has less lines.
“We love doing a play with a lot of people,” Cash said.
The performances will benefit Waynesboro’s Becky Buyny, who is receiving radiation at UVA for stage 3 endometrial cancer, the most common type of uterine cancer.
“It’s kind of all encompassing — ovaries, uterus, cervix,” Buyny, a 1973 graduate of Stuarts Draft High School, said. She had a hysterectomy in May.
She is retired after 23 years with McKee Foods. Buyny said she began to feel unwell in early 2024 with back pain and then trouble going to the bathroom. She thought she had a kidney infection.
“I really felt bad,” she said of Easter night after cooking dinner for her husband and son. Her husband insisted on taking her to the emergency room.
Doctors found a tumor.
“Because the tumor was shutting my kidneys off,” Buyny said of the explanation for her pain.
Stints were placed in her kidneys because doctors believed she only had a fibroid tumor. Two weeks later, however, Buyny was not feeling well again and returned to the ER. Tubes were inserted in her back to her kidneys and remained for five months.
“It was a wonderful day the day they were able to take them out,” she said.
A doctor at Augusta Health found that not only did Buyny have a fibroid tumor, she also had a cancerous tumor.
“I give him full credit that. [He said] ‘if you were my mother, I would want you at UVA,’” Buyny said.
A hysterectomy in May followed. At her last CT scan, no cancer was detected. She completed chemotherapy in October, and began five to six weeks of radiation at UVA in early November. Buyny said the five days a week of radiation is “an insurance policy to try to prevent it from returning.”
The radiation is a “second defense” against an aggressive form of cancer known as HER2, which her doctors labeled stage 3.
“The hope is that they will have the cancer eradicated,” Buyny, who had no family history of cancer, said.
She said the money raised by the Crimora Players will fund her travel expenses to and from UVA, because she’s “blessed to have good insurance.”
“What these people do is amazing. Amazing that they give so much of their time,” she said of Crimora Players.
Crimora Community Center is at 1648 New Hope & Crimora Rd., Crimora. Tickets are $15 per person, including dinner, and are available via email [email protected] or by calling Irene at 540-943-9967 or call/text Teresa at 540-487-0526. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday.
The Crimora Players’ next theater production is scheduled for February 14 to 16, 2024.
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Rebecca Barnabi
