Word: playwrightes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Levin's new thriller, Deathtrap, decides to do and, not so coincidentally, it is what Ira Levin, a successful novelist (Rosemary's Baby, The Boys from Brazil) who hasn't had a Broadway hit in over a decade has done. Deathtrap economically combines two lastditch themes: the playwright-trying-to-write-a-play theme, which sets up worlds-within-worlds and all that twaddle, and the who-can-double-cross-whom-faster theme, the new nadir of the mystery genre, where all guns are filled with blanks, corpses fall to be later resurrected and everyone conspires against everyone else...
...drawing-room thriller once breathed haltingly in the hands of such skillful practitioners as Agatha Christie, but even ignoring its dubious dramatic value, the form was always limited. Having exhausted all possible realistic variations, it is not surprising that the thriller playwright has had to turn the form in on itself, self-consciousness being the last available twist. The character of Andrew Wyke, the bigoted, infantile, impotent detective novelist in Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, was the logical culmination of the mystery-writer's view of himself in a world where such structured escapism has become frustratingly antiquated...
Deathtrap is not the ingenious successor to Sleuth that Levin obviously wanted to write, but a desperate imitation of it. The same sorts of turn-arounds preponderate, and the playwright-protagonist, Sidney Bruhl (John Wood), as unscrupled as Wyke when it comes to murder, speaks in similarly sardonic conceits. But Levin, although he tries hard, has neither Shaffer's command of language nor his ability to make each epigram peculiarly illustrative of some aspect of character; Levin uses witticisms to fill pauses. To be fair, the script contains many very funny lines--assorted theater jokes, ESP jokes...
...Friday, Jan. 27, the day after Deathtrap had opened at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. Moore had spent the afternoon with the playwright, Ira Levin, and the cast, making cuts in the script and rehearsing the changes. At 5 p.m. the rehearsal broke up; the Boston Globe arrived to talk to John Wood, the show's lead, who had stopped in Boston last year with Tom Stoppard's Travesties, and we settled down in the auditorium with a relaxed, casual Robert Moore. A few stagehands milled about the stage...
Each detective mauls each culprit. Simon takes it with world-weary stoicism, his eyes like stagnant pools. Jimmy cries like an abused child. Eventually, the tortured and the torturers seem more like kin than enemies. Playwright Babe skillfully evokes their dawning camaraderie. Where he goes wrong is in tagging on the murky moral that all men are brothers or, perhaps, unisexual...