Dan Marois has been murderer and victim.

Theatrically speaking.

Marois has run Main Street Entertainment with his wife, Denise, for 20 years. One of the acting troupe’s popular offerings: Mystery for Hire, a traveling murder mystery dinner theater show that will come up on its 500th performance in 2013.

Marco’s in Lewiston, Augusta’s Senator Inn and Bangor’s Spectacular Event Center are frequent stops. Coming this summer: Mystery cruises on the Songo River Queen.

“Being the engineer in the first-grade play — I got started with the (acting) bug there,” said Marois.

Name: Dan Marois

Age: 58

Lives: Poland Spring

470-plus shows to date, any stand out? We’ve done a first-time wedding and a second-time wedding, the first in Jackson, N.H., and the other in Freeport. It has been humbling to return to my hometown of Berlin, N.H., to see old friends and family. We usually get fed before shows (yes, we portray the starving actor routine quite well!) and we’ve dined on some of the finest food in the state in some of the most elegant rooms set aside for us. Likewise, we’ve dined in broom closets or sat offstage next to drippy water pipes.

Show day routine: We show up for a performance about an hour before the doors open, we rehearse lines, and then we wait until show time. Every audience is different. The best ones are those that are there to have fun and who are willing to “let their hair down.” Occasionally, we encounter what we call a “tough audience.” These are the ones that have a mix of everyday people who never quite find the groove of how to have fun together. We find ourselves working twice as hard to entertain them.

What makes for a convincing victim? Deceased ones work best. Since we mix our mystery shows with lots of comedy, it is, perhaps, no surprise that very few of our audiences can guess who did the crime. Many people prefer to write down that they don’t “have a clue” or that the victim committed suicide.

Most memorable “I can’t believe I just did/said that!”? Although we’ve performed so many shows with the same people for over 17 years, there are moments that we forget lines, jump to other scenes or have no idea where we are headed with the script. How do we deal with this? We make fun of ourselves and tell the audience that we have no clue where we are. They love it when we screw up! Somehow it makes us human and not these controlled actors that can’t break character.

I can tell you two shows that we regret doing! One was set around a swimming pool in York, Maine. (Large space with a smell of chlorine.) Another show was for a group of senior citizens on a bus tour. When we got to the venue, we discovered that they had been delayed on their tour and had spent the last six hours on a bus. Needless to say, they were ready to eat and sleep and not be entertained.

Farthest you’ve traveled to see a theater performance? “The Lion King” in London. Very cool.

Performance on your need-to-see wish list? Anything on Broadway will do, thank you very much. We are so busy doing our shows that we rarely see other shows. In fact, the time I saw more shows was when I was a theater reviewer for the Sun Journal for 12 years.

Did you enjoy the board game “Clue” as a kid? Never played it. I was a Monopoly type of kid. And apparently, many other kids never played it as well! At every show we perform only about 5 percent of the audience actually guesses who did the crime and why.

Candlestick, lead pipe or rope: Best way to do someone in, theatrically? Theatrically, the best way to do someone in is to make sure they come alive again to appear as another character (who is usually destined to die once again) or to appear as the detective who will solve the crime.

kskelton@sunjournal.com

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