Shelter Island Reporter Review

Audience Well-served by New Kaasik Play

“The Servant’s Last Serve,” 

an original comedy written and directed by John and Karl Kaasik, played to a standing-room-only crowd in Fellowship Hall at the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church Saturday night.
The play’s one-liners and amusing characters had the audience laughing throughout the show. The actors more than made up for the makeshift theatre’s challenges. With no stage and the entire audience at floor level, the action was difficult to see, particularly as the lead character, Sir Winston Livingston, played by John Kaasik, was in a wheelchair.
Despite the venue’s limitations, the lighting, costumes and scenery transformed it into the turn-of-the-century British estate of Sir Livingston, who is diagnosed with a fatal brain disease at the beginning of the show. Alan Stewart played the slow-moving, sometimes slow-thinking Dr. Bradsworth, who delivered the bad news. Sir Winston’s will and his cat, Master Fifi, were pivotal to the plot as the lord told his loyal staff that he is leaving his fortune to the feline. The usually orderly house is anything but when the servants — the butler Leonard, played with both aplomb and passion by Tom Lamothe, Colette Gilbert’s coquettish cook, Marian McEnroe’s dim-witted maid and Jack Monaghan’s aging Irish groundskeeper — discover that the cat has disappeared. The staff as well as Sir Winston’s money-grubbing niece, played southern-belle style by Margaret Kestler, fall under suspicion as Detective Woodmore, a.k.a. Karl Kaasik, comes bungling into and out of the scene.
All ends well, except for the cat. There was no curtain, ergo no curtain call, but the audience showed its appreciation with a standing ovation just the same.
Proceeds from the event, which included dessert served by young ladies in vintage maid outfits, will benefit the church.