The Department of Theatre and Dance at SUNY Fredonia will present Ira Levin’s Broadway hit thriller, Deathtrap, as its next Walter Gloor Mainstage production opening March 4. Director Mary Charbonnet said, "This is one of the trickiest, mind-boggling plots ever to confound an audience.".
 
All performances for Deathtrap will take place in the Marvel Theatre of the Rockefeller Arts Center. The suspenseful, comedy hit will also have performances on March 5, 10, 11, 12 at 8 p.m. and a special matinee on March 6 at 2 p.m. Audiences will have the opportunity to discuss the play with cast, designers, and crew following the matinee performance of March 6. Tickets for the mystery are $12 for adults and $10 for students. The Central Ticket Office in the Williams Center is taking reservations during regular business hours at 673-3501.
 
Ira Levin’s murder comedy is about a once-highly successful mystery drama writer, Sidney Bruhl, who announces at the very outset of the play that he would indeed commit murder to get another hit on Broadway. He currently bolsters his income by teaching a writing course at a local university. One of his students has come up with a play script that even he considers failure proof. Bruhl cagily observes, “Even a great director couldn’t ruin it.” And so the student is invited to come to his home for a “story conference.” Or will it be something else? An execution perhaps?
 
There follows a complicated game of murderous, musical chairs. Bodies are buried in the garden; someone gets an arrow from a medieval crossbow into the heart; a psychic woman brings warnings of disaster but seems to get her spectral information mixed up. At the end of the evening a good percentage of the cast has been obliterated by fiendish means, keeping audiences on the edge of their seats all of the time. Cast members have remarked on the intricate details and complexity of the script as being a major challenge in creating the play.
 
Deathtrap will feature a talented cast of BFA acting and musical theatre majors including, Marc de la Concha (Sidney Bruhl) starring as the acid tongued plotter of murders on and off the stage. Alison Schmitt (Myra Bruhl), a music education major, will be seen as his edgy wife, an unwilling accomplice in the disastrous scheme. B.J. Erdmann (Clifford Anderson) will portray the talented student who is advised to bring his potential hit script to the writer, along with all of his copies and notes.
 
Charlotte Dunn (Helga Ten Dorp) will have the role of a Dutch psychic whose specialty is advising the police on difficult cases and Dan Lendzian (Porter Milgrim) completes the cast, portraying a conventional New England lawyer with a devastating urge to write mysteries.
 
James Ivey, director of Dearly Departed, has chosen to set the play in his native, West Texas. Actors were sent home for their Christmas vacation with accent tapes to develop their drawls before rehearsals began in earnest in January. Michael Hetzer is designing the scenery for the many locales in the fictional towns of Lula and Timson, Texas. The contemporary costumes are designed by Bekah Carey and lighting by Neely Kinne.
 
Director Charbonnet will have the task of orchestrating the screams of terror that emerge from the surprising twists of the story. Jessica Stanley has the responsibility of designing the setting of a Connecticut home decorated with the various tools of death used in the mystery writer’s plays. Watch for Stanley’s magnificent setting to dominate the stage of the Marvel Theatre as if it were another character in the play. Kimberly Beland will design the contemporary costumes and Kristen Egan will design the lighting.