What is community theater, and exactly what is it supposed to accomplish? Can it offer professional quality, or should we resign ourselves to watching Joe the Pharmacist and Mary the Bank Teller stumble through A Streetcar Named Desire?  In other words, should it be entry level for adorably inept actors and directors, or does a paying audience have the right to expect innate talent under the guidance of trained directors? These are not merely academic questions; they're the basis for ongoing conflict in amateur theaters throughout the United States. Olympia Little Theatre, for example, attracts directors who argue passionately for either side of the debate.  As a critic, I often question whether Mary the Bank Teller, who might be god-awful on the boards, really signed on for public condemnation when she "tried out" for that cute little theater on Miller Avenue.

Thankfully, these questions can be deferred, as OLT is on a three-play talent roll. The trained eye finds professional acumen in Murder on the Nile: Terence Artz did a fine job of blocking in a difficult space, and the show is entirely of a tone. Allison Gerst's costumes are as spot-on as any in the more upscale, professional houses downtown. Even details as seemingly mundane as a painted floor or period magazines hold up under close inspection; Artz had to remind certain audience members not to sneak draughts of prop "cocktails." On the performing side, Hannah Broom displays a deep understanding of early 20th-century stage acting, Tim Shute possesses Huckabeean stolidity as a Hercule Poirot stand-in, and Cassie Cahill finds the giddy fun in pretentious snobbery (I can relate).

It behooves me to confess the shameful fact that at the age of 41, despite years of Sherlock Holmes fandom, I'd been a total Agatha Christie virgin thus far.  It's not the whodunit aspects of Holmes that appeal to me; as with House, I'm much more interested in the crusty idiosyncrasies of the title sleuth than in the mystery itself.  Murder offers no such riveting presence; indeed, Christie had grown tired of writing Poirot (she'd come to think of him as a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep") and replaced him with the flamingly trustworthy Ambrose Pennefather, an Anglican parish priest. It's rare for a crime solver to be one of his mystery's suspects, so I found myself hoping Canon Pennefather himself dunit. Alas, no such edge was to be found, though the investigation has - to my untrained eyes, at least - a satisfying resolution.  The play's plot and list of suspects have been vastly simplified from Christie's source novel, Death on the Nile, but her abbreviated "locked ship" mystery plays fair.

One caveat, typical of community theater's stratospheric ambitions running smack into the reality of limited resources:  Artz's notes promise we'll be "immersed in the sounds seeping through the walls ... the drum beat, the minaret [i.e., the muezzin], the jackal's cry."  Well, I for one was ready to choke that damn jackal with a pillow. An all too brief loop of Egyptian ambience was indeed immersive the first 47 times; but it couldn't have run longer than a minute, and a speaker was right over my head. Soon I could scarcely concentrate on the cast's unevenly successful European accents while that unfortunate canine was run through a pasta press, time and time again. A little animal cruelty on the Nile goes a long way.

[Olympia Little Theatre, Murder on the Nile, through May 2, 7:55 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 1:55 p.m. Sunday, $8-$12, 1925 Miller Ave. NE, Olympia, 360.786.9484]