In Theatre in the Round's able production of Agatha Christie's The Unexpected Guest, I can just about guarantee that there's no way you are going to guess who dunnit—not by a long shot.

Christie is the doyen of barely plausible plots that gyrate and twist like grabbed snakes. She inserts red herrings and drops occasional clues, but then remarkably, at play's end, you can look back and say, well, yes, of course.

This entertaining 1958 chestnut opens on Michael Hoover's elegant set of the Welsh country home of a big game hunter, complete with mounted animal heads on the walls and African spear artifacts on the paneling. A gunshot on the darkened set made me leap in my seat. As the lights slowly rise, the beam of a flashlight probes the foggy night beyond the French windows. A man enters the room to find a body slumped in an old-fashioned wheelchair and an attractive woman holding a gun. We're off to two hours of impenetrable mystery and ten characters, nine of whom could have some degree of motivation to kill.

Ron Ravensborg is a capable Michael Starkwedder, the unexpected guest whose car has become embedded in a ditch when he lost the road in dense Welsh sea fog. Starkwedder's reaction to the murder is curious, to say the least, and he's clearly attracted to the glamorous new widow, Laura Warwick (pronounced the English way, Worick.) This is 1958, so don't be surprised at Starkwedder's sexist generalizations about women.

As Laura, who is dressed to kill, even in the middle of the night, Katherine Kupiecki brings a nice mix of pride and vulnerability to her role. Josh Jabas convinces as twitchy Jan, the dead man's emotionally undeveloped, adult brother; he's needy, manipulative and as obsessed with guns and killing as his nasty dead brother, whom he feared and hated. Aha! Clue, or red herring?

It's Dan Peterson as the smooth Angell, the dead man's nurse-cum-butler, who commands Theatre in the Round's arena stage with his sinister presence. John Adler's dogged persistence as crime solving Inspector Thomas works well, and he must contend with the lazy, poetry-reading, mouth-stuffing incompetent, Sergeant Cadwallader, played in suitably relaxed style by Ryan Grimes. It's a pity that costume designer Jamie Williams couldn't locate the distinctive English policeman's uniform for Cadwallader. This Cadwallader looks more like a Chicago cop than a 1958, English policeman.

Maggie Bearmon Pistner, Anita O'Sullivan, and David Beukema round-out the large cast. Under Fiacre Douglas' coaching, the characters assume regional British accents, some a bit stiffer than others.

Much of the play's humor comes from the art of understatement, and director Wendy Resch Novak adds nice touches, as when Sergeant Cadwallader imitates the gestures of his chief, as though he's rehearsing a more elevated future for himself.

Novak would be wise to hasten the pace in this long but entertaining play. Although Agatha Christie is a master of the devious plot, her weakness as a playwright is to have characters give each other the background information that the audience needs to know. Speeding up the pace might help to mask the structural problem.

This The Unexpected Guest is in the best tradition of community theater. Theatre in the Round can afford to mount large-cast productions because its largely amateur artists donate their time and talents for the sheer pleasure of making theater. They reach for professionalism, and love for their art radiates from the stage in this pleasing production.

The Unexpected Guest May 29 - June 21, 2009. Fridays and Saturdays, 8:00 p.m., Sundays 2:00 p.m. Tickets $10 - $20 at 612- 333-3010, or online at www.TheatreintheRound.org. Theatre in the Round Players, 245, Cedar Ave., Minneapolis, 55454.

Be sure to check the current schedule for theatre in the Twin Cities area