(LENOX, Mass.) – Rupert Holmes’s comic thriller Accomplice, which won the prestigious Edgar Award (the “Oscar of Crime”) and the Dramalogue Award for Best Play, is being staged at Shakespeare & Company, in the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, now through Sunday, November 10, 2013. The cast includes four of the company’s most popular and skilled comic actors — Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Jason Asprey, Annie Considine and Josh Aaron McCabe – reunited for the first time since their appearance together in last summer’s comic play, Parasite Drag.

Like many conventional English thrillers, Accomplice is set in a lovely country house where a wife and her lover plan to murder her stuffy husband. But Accomplice veers away from the conventional, and has enough plot twists, character twists and compromising situations to spin the British comic-thriller genre on its ear.

Rupert Holmes’s script crackles with witty references to well-known thrillers including The Mouse Trap and Death Trap, soap operas, and even dance instructor Arthur Murray. The mystery of the play’s ending comes with a guarantee: director Stephen Rothman says, “As long as you promise me that you have never read, seen, or heard about the way ‘Accomplice’ works, I will personally buy any audience member dinner if they answer to how the play will conclude after the first act ends.”

Rupert Holmes is a prolific author, singer-songwriter, musician and playwright. His theatrical works include the 1985 Tony Award-winning musical Drood (originally The Mystery of Edwin Drood), the 2007 Drama Desk Award-winning book for the Broadway musical Curtains, and the TV series “Remember WENN.”

He is also, unaccountably, the songwriter and singer behind two of the most commercially successful but perhaps all-time-worst pop hits: 1979’s “Him” and “Escape (The Pina Colada Song).”