We all know that we're supposed to suspend disbelief when we go to the theater, but I seem to have gone Coleridge one better and actually suspended memory. It's not as though I haven't read the book and seen the movies (although, granted, centuries ago), but I seem to have forgotten whodunit. And so I had quite a pleasant time at the Hedgerow production of Tim Kelly's adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous Sherlock Holmes mystery.

As I now, of course, recall, the story concerns the Baskerville family, whose heir has just returned to the eerie mansion on the moors after his uncle was apparently viciously attacked and murdered by a hellhound — a gigantic dog with red eyes — that has haunted the family for generations. There are all manner of subplots: romances, legacies, half-burned letters and lots and lots of fog.

Hedgerow does a mystery every year in the autumn, and it always has a kind of Masterpiece Theatre wannabe quality. And so it is this time, with earnest, slightly awkward actors speaking with English accents that sound like nothing anybody on earth speaks except in small theaters. Then Tom Teti, as Sherlock Holmes, blows into the scene, bringing the refreshing gleam of Equity polish to the show, pointing his finger, plucking letters from unsuspecting hands, whirling out of the room. He's not the crazed, intense Sherlock Holmes the great Jeremy Brett gave us — nostrils flaring, eyes darting. Nor is he Basil Rathbone's creepy Holmes; like Hedgerow, Teti provides a far more wholesome Holmes. Significantly, it does not end with the now-famous line, "Quick Watson, the needle!" Teti's exit line is, "Come Watson — the game's afoot!"

In fact, it is lack of personality that marks (or fails to mark) these characters; the point of this play is, clearly, the plot, and the result is a lack of psychological color of any kind. Zoran Kovcic is a stolid Dr. Watson (he also designed the fine set), and, like everybody else, he gets the job done under Janet Kelsey's direction.

The hound howls, the suspects pile up and everybody has a good time; the Sunday matinee I went to had an audience made up largely of the Mycroft League (Mycroft being Sherlock's smarter brother), so this is as tough a crowd as Hedgerow is likely to see.