Margot (Gwynnevere Cristobal) and Maxine (Maria Marquis) are listing all the possible means and motives for murder. “Money, fear, jealousy, revenge,” Margot begins. But there’s one more, Maxine points out: “protecting someone you love.”
This is how the on-again-off-again couple flirt with each other in “Dial M for Murder,” now in a City Lights Theater Company production. They’re just that kind of pair — like danger is part of the thrill of their extramarital affair.
But in Jeffrey Hatcher’s remake of Frederick Knott’s play and Alfred Hitchcock’s film, that list of motives turns out to be prescient. All come into play in this meticulously hatched murder plot, and the dialogue is delicious. One purred threat: “I felt that you belonged to me.” Another: “That’s why I know you’re going to agree.”
Mark Anderson Phillips directs the show, in which a near-stranger gets talked into a murder in a single perfect scene, and a murder novelist theorizes about murder narratives without realizing she’s in one.