Unicorn’s The JonBenét Game dares to ask “What if true crime garbage is good, actually?”

The JonBenét Game. // Photo by Don Ipock

Look, no one is more suspicious than me when a piece of media comes along that promises to challenge our societal ideas about True Crime. I came up in the stand-up comedy world alongside a few of the Big Names that would go on to make careers out of repeating Wikipedia entries about dead women as a form of entertainment. I’ve sat through every Netflix/Discovery series where the experts clearly couldn’t expert their way out of a paper bag. I’ll even show up for the Crème de la crème of the TC industry: whatever Ryan Murphy’s latest show is that both diverts so far from a true story that it becomes cartoonish exploitation while chastizing the audience for being part of the machine.

I have watched the rise and fall across mediums and decades, and have absorbed every criticism, doled it out, and re-absorbed the strays. There is little in this arena left to surprise me when it comes to the meta, be it flagglation or self-flagglation—I’m the problem and I know it. There’s not much ground left to tread.

So when a less-than-80-minute independent play with a cast of only three people throws you a curveball, it deserves serious kudos.

In a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, The JonBenét Game is currently debuting at The Unicorn Theatre [3828 Main St]. Tori Keenan-Zelt’s show treads in the eternally choppy waters of the disconnect and disorientation between school teachers, students, and administrators.

The JonBenét Game. // Photo by Don Ipock

Rae (Elise Poehling) works as a guidance counselor at a high school, trying to stay afloat as an adult in her small Missouri hometown despite buried traumas, both old and new. With a sense of misplaced optimism, she tries her best to fix the ‘problem kids’ assigned to her. Miss Kay (Julie Shaw) is a supervising teacher, worn down by bureaucracy and old-timey wisdom/limitations of a woman bringing hands-off professionalism to a community primarily influenced by the teachings of Jesus. Hazel (Lainey McManamy) falls into Rae’s office, having pushed her English teacher too far with questions about sexual imagery in an assigned reading. Miss Kay knows that the young Hazel is recovering from a recent suicide in the family, and instructs Rae on how to keep advice limited and sanitized—for everyone’s protection.

But Rae recognizes the yielding pull of adolescent curiosity. Disciplining Hazel for being too smart for this place will only serve to push her further into darkness, but any form of genuine encouragement would be seen as an attack on the school, and the town itself. Through a circuitous assignment, the teenager falls into an obsession with the tentpole true crime mystery of JonBenét Ramsey’s murder—one that her new guidance counselor is all too familiar with. As a woman who admits to listening to “a lot of podcasts” it becomes an easy second language to slip seamlessly into the world of conspiracy and information overload.

The road of least resistance here would be to let these two spiral into bloody fandom until one, or both, winds up in trouble with the high school. Instead, The JonBenét Game aims much higher. The flawed teacher with noble intentions and the student seeking genuine engagement find exactly what they need in a shared hobby. Where Hazel cannot be allowed to challenge narratives or authority in the classroom, her sessions with Rae offer unbound, limitless potential for debate, independent research, and the joy of pursuing knowledge that the school paradoxically attempts to passively destroy. As women split by two decades attempt to reconcile the uncontrollable horrors of their own lives, the secret shared language of ‘true crime’ allows them to find meaning—and healing. “People are afraid to get too close to trauma,” the show acknowledges, and making a game of a thirty-year-old child murder cold case provides all the space they need.

Director Ernie Nolan keeps the trio of performers in constant motion, including set choices that never feel forced while managing jagged shifts in time and tenor. Shaw’s tiny mannerisms as Miss Kay are so good at evoking ‘Midwest teacher with a forced smile’ that I felt pangs of PTSD. McManamy manages an uncanny mastery of an entire spectrum of manias, all while never letting us forget the void at the heart of obsessions. Poehling, with the added ask of some changes in her character not mentioned in this piece, delivers on nothing less than what must have been the playwright’s platonic ideal of the performance.

While dark in all the ways one might expect from the title, The JonBenét Game finds more joy in asking, “What if true crime garbage has actual power? What if it can be used to fix little blemishes at the edges of our broken world?” The show comes with our highest recommendation, and you owe it to yourself to catch one of the final performances. I’ll probably see you there, because one round with this cast was not enough.

The JonBenét Game. // Photo by Don Ipock