By Rafal Rogoza—

Thousands have chuckled watching YouTube videos of the knocked out shoplifter who banged his head into a locked convenience store door after making a wild — and apparently blind — dash for the street with the stolen goods in hand, and my personal favorite, the burglar who dressed to court in the clothes he was being accused of stealing.

Sloppy crooks and their antics are a good recipe for comedy, especially if you mix additional odd-ball characters into the pot, like gangster Boston Benny and simpleton Cordelia Tuttle in the latest New Jersey City University production of “Strange Boarders,” a 1947 comedy written by George Batson and Jack Kirkland that opened at the Margaret Williams Theatre on Thursday, October 25.

The play, under the direction of Anderson Johnson, begins with mobsters Smiley (Jamal Price) and Joey (Crystal Torres) quietly prowling about as uninvited guests at Cordelia Tuttle’s (Nicole Carvajal) home to the saxophone rich tune of the Pink Panther instrumental playing in the background. The two goons are on the search for the voluptuous Haines sisters who made-off with $100,000 from a bank heist orchestrated by the criminal group’s mastermind Boston Benny (Mitchell Vargas).

Caught up in the mob’s double-crossing is Cordelia, an optimistic and poverty stricken woman who takes into her shore-front home two orphaned girls, a weary sea captain and a wacky professor. When the town’s representative of “proper society”, Myrtle Hodge (Scarlett Santiago), confronts Cordelia with the threat of losing her two girls because of poor living conditions, Cordelia decides to give up her struggling sowing endeavor and instead uses her home as a boarding house in the hope of collecting rent.

Cordelia’s first guests are the Haines sisters who pose as school teachers reviewing exams locked inside a suitcase that is actually full of the stolen cash. A slew of mobsters, who Cordelia thinks are honest guests, are drawn to the house in search for the money. The story takes a turn when the good-natured Cordelia accidentally stumbles across the banknotes and reads about the heist in the newspaper.

However, unlike those instantly gratify and hilarious security camera video clips on YouTube, the laughs in “Strange Boarders” come well after the opening lines of the roughly two-hour production. The opening act was full of dull dialogue that, to put it frankly, was boring as the audience is being introduced to the many characters — in all there are fifteen — and the subplots intertwining them.

The humor picks-up somewhat as the plot develops and Cordelia schemes against the mobsters over the money. The play becomes livelier with action and well delivered funny one liners; at one point Boston Benny orders Smiley to look in the breadbox for the money, when Smiley finds it empty he answers in his low voice, “Hey Boss, the money ain’t here, there even ain’t any bread.”

Nicole Carvajal’s performance as Cordelia was central to the play and she delivered. The daunting task of playing the lead role of a character that is the glue of this production and not falter or fall from exhaustion earns Carvajal as much kudos as Edmund Hillary’s ascent to the summit of Mt. Everest.

She was on stage almost the entire production chasing mobsters, discussing the “birds and the bees”, and even chatting away with her headless sowing dummy. At times silly and others a nurturing mother, Carvajal was exceptional in all aspects and made the part look easy.

Photos by Sean Ramnarain