Ira Levin's Deathtrap at ACT Players

The play starts quietly enough: a well-known, older writer of suspense plays named Sydney Bruhl is in the midst of a long success drought when he receives the copy of a play written by an eager young attendee of Sydney’s recent theater seminar. The play by the young upstart is surprisingly brilliant—“It can’t miss,” Sydney tells his wife, Myra, “A gifted director couldn’t even hurt it.” And then, an idea starts to form slowly but that slowly in his mind: what if no one else knows this young man has written this terrific thriller? He could release it under his own name and finally find success again. One glitch, of course: the young man would have to die. “Would you, could you?” asks Myra. “Probably not…” says Sydney. And so begins the twisted journey of Sydney, Myra, and Clifford Anderson, the eager young hopeful, soon joined by wacky psychic Helga Ten Dorp and respectable attorney Porter Milgrim. Or could he? What happens next has been startling audiences around the world for decades.