When others demand that we become the people they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. It’s a subtle kind of murder. —Jim Morrison
The play A Subtle Kind of Murder written by Dale Dunn had its world premiere at the New Mexico Actors Lab this past summer, and it has just been nominated for the Broadway World Awards in the categories of Best New Play, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Ensemble Acting, Best Scenic Design, Best Lighting Design, and Best Production! This achievement could not make me happier or be more inspiring for myself as a fellow playwright who offered feedback in the early stages of writing. I had the pleasure of being a part of Jennie Webb’s Next Draft Workshop with Dale back in 2021, reading early drafts of the script when the sinewy musculature hadn’t been fully realized and the thematic threads were not neatly tied. It is always satisfying to see a play come together after being a part of its developmental process. Dale knew clearly what she wanted to write about, but there was a lot of metaphor and symbolism within the overlapping worlds she was creating, especially tied to the multimedia aspect of her piece that needed shaping. What I remembered most about her play was that it was deeply feminist, and it spoke to the relentless sexism and abuse of young women who are trying to make something of themselves professionally. While I did not get to see the production, I reached out to Dale to read the latest production copy of the play. I’ve now just read it, and all I can say is that it leaves a reader breathless! I can only imagine what it was like to have a seat in the darkened theater. Five years in the making, and the final script is simultaneously heartbreaking, gut-punching and, dare I say, hopeful.
A Subtle Kind of Murder is a play seeded by a confluence of ideas (and worlds) that are all thematically tied to living as a woman in a sexually predatory patriarchy. Jane, an acclaimed novelist, has been hired to write a screenplay adaptation of the 1947 noir murder mystery novel In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. Under deadline to finish the script, Jane sequesters herself in her childhood home, a remote Kansas farmhouse with the Filmmaker, her staunch but strict motivator who encourages Jane to stay focused and get the job done. However, the two are unexpectedly interrupted by the Woman in Brown, a young, bright-eyed woman who stumbles into the farmhouse after being followed by the Man in the Hat. The Man in the Hat, a shadowy figure whose voice and presence is felt by all the women, but never materializes until play’s end, doubles as the serial killer from Hughes’ novel and the bigtime executive who once sexually assaulted Jane in a Hollywood studio, when she was once a young, naïve assistant, whose dreams of making it big in the industry were killed from the humiliating transgression. Not coincidentally, Jane’s current writing contract is with the same Hollywood executive who assaulted her decades before; he does not recognize her because she’s taken on the pen name Jane Franklin, after Ben Franklin’s sister, a woman who never got an education nor a fair shot while her brother was given every resource to become the famous intellectual, inventor, and founding father. So, it’s fair to say, Jane has something to prove and an axe to grind.
As the play progresses, we start to gather that the Woman in Brown, like the Man in the Hat, doubles as the murder victim in the Hughes novel as well as the younger version of Jane. She is, as Jane describes her, “the young woman who had the nerve to think of the world as her oyster.” Both the Woman in Brown and the Filmmaker are versions of Jane at different stages of her life. They serve as figments of her imagination as she is haunted by the chilling veil of a man’s rapaciousness while she fights to claim her agency as a woman and an artist. Jane references her own acclaimed novel, which is the same title as this play, by describing a subtle kind of murder as the “the murder of the self.” Jane goes on to say “The subtle kind of murder leaves you in a sort of tortured half life….dazed…powerless…often fighting shame and regret.” As the three women argue over Jane’s chosen pen name, she declares “Jane. It’s every woman’s name.” Here is the crux of the play for me. Aren’t we women all Jane? Even in 2025, when there is lip service paid toward a #MeToo movement that holds powerful men accountable, it seems that for every jailed Weinstein, Cosby, or Epstein, there is another man lurking in the shadows, ready to decimate a woman as, in Dale’s words, “just another girl in the office.” Ultimately, as Dale describes, the play is about “self-forgiveness.” She says, “there are so many Why didn’t I?’s in life.” She is quick to answer the question: “Well, you didn’t, and it’s okay. You have to look at it. And then leave it.” She goes on to explain, “Jane is confronting her past, the assault that made her turn away from her ambitions, and she needs to see it for what it is in order to move past it and do the creative work she is meant to do.” The pain of regret and humiliation is suffocating, and it consumes so many victims of assault. But it’s not just physical assault that women contend with, it’s the multitude of micro-aggressions that tell us to behave, to please, to keep quiet, to wait our turn, to act right, to apologize, to shrink, to cower, and on and on and on. A woman must permit herself to reject it all, to say no, to get out from under the patriarchal power.
The play is a multi-media performance that utilizes film projection and sound to tell its story. Dale has a lot of experience using projections in her staged works. She sees it as a theatrical tool to serve as “an extension of the mind” and to be “inside the writer’s [Jane’s] mind” as opposed to being a place setter. Throughout the play there is the projection of Jane’s text as it is being typed, the thunderous and chilling projection of the ocean—the place where the Woman in Brown is found murdered—and of the diner into which the Woman in Brown escapes. All of the stage design and multimedia lends itself to the mirrored and mysterious worlds characteristic of the noir genre.
Dale herself is no newbie to the theater. She has worked in theaters across the nation including the Public Theater in New York and the Red Barn Theater in Key West. She co-founded her own theater in New Mexico called Just Say It Theater and has years of teaching experience in both playwriting and production at New Mexico School for the Arts. Her longtime theater partner, Lynn Goodwin served as both the dramaturg and director of A Subtle Kind of Murder, which explains the synergy, flexibility, experimentation, and care that the ensemble carried throughout the developmental process from table read to production.
I asked Dale whether or not she had a recording of the piece that I could view; Sadly, she didn’t have anything, only a muffled and grainy recording that wouldn’t do the play justice. At first, I felt that this was disappointing, but I also realize it’s sort of the point. Nothing can replace the ephemeral magic of theatre. I truly hope A Subtle Kind of Murder gets another production; It’s a play that every Jane (and John) should see.
