Photo via Sunset Playhouse
A blind housewife becomes the target of a group of con men looking for a mysterious doll in Frederick Knott’s 1960s stage drama Wait Until Dark. Director Dustin J. Martin brings a contemporary staging of the classic drama to Elm Grove’s Sunset Playhouse this month. A humbly heroic Maura Atwood plays Susan the housewife in a painstakingly rendered production that capably maintains tension and pacing from beginning to end.
Fresh from his memorably comic performance in Sunset’s production of Run For Your Wife this past September, Josh Scheibe shows the stage a far more sinister side as a gentleman named Roat who convinces a couple of guys that they can come into a great deal of money if they help him steal a doll from a blind woman. What seems like an easy task turns out to be quite a bit more as a Gloria (a girl living upstairs from Susan) gets involved. Eva Dahlberg lends an engaging charm to the stage as Gloria in a cast otherwise populated by generally unsavory criminals. Chris Celestin is endearingly duplicitous as a man posing as an old friend of Susan’s husband who has popped-by for a visit. Ralph Frattura summons a more aggressive menace as a criminal posing as a policeman investigating a murder.
Costume Designer Lisa Quinn casts the ensemble in subtly stylish outfits for the drama which fit quite well into a moody set by Matt Carr. Lighting Designer Marty Wallner lends Quinn and Carr’s world an appropriately shadowy resonance. It all comes together so powerfully.
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Sunset Playhouse’s production of Wait Until Dark runs through Nov. 7 at Furlan Auditorium, 700 Wall Street, Elm Grove. For tickets, call the box office at 262-782-4430 or visit sunsetplayhouse.com.
