Scalp Tingler

By T.E.K.

DEATHTRAP by Ira Levin

The murder-mystery thriller is a theatrically endangered species. Seasons go by without one, and there have been seven lean years since the last dandy scalp tingler, Sleuth. Deathtrap is a congenial successor--literate, amusing, booby-trapped with scarifying surprises, a brimming tumbler of arsenic and Schweppes.

Actually, no one is poisoned. Garroting and fiendishly induced heart attacks are more the tools of this particular evening of murder. Oh yes, and a handsomely lethal crossbow.

The rule in reviewing thrillers is to be elusive. Tell the beginning but never tell the middle and the end. In the beginning, Sidney Bruhl (John Wood) is a guileful craftsman of stage thrillers who has a writer's block. It's a fairly long block, almost as wide and arid as the Sahara. For 17 years he has failed to concoct a Broadway hit.

An ardent acolyte and student in Bruhl's writing seminar has just sent him a murder mystery that makes Bruhl greedy with envy. To the young man, Clifford Anderson (Victor Garber), Bruhl proffers collaboration, an older man's sophisticated nurture of a sapling script. Refused. To his staunchly supportive wife Myra (Marian Seldes), Bruhl speculates about taking Anderson's life, swiping the sole copy of the manuscript and presenting it as his own.

After this, the plot coils around the characters like a boa constrictor and embraces the audience in fun and terror. One of the subsidiary characters is Helga ten Dorp (Marian Winters), a psychic who prophesies events with a certain deadly inaccuracy. Winters makes her the most consumingly droll zany since Mildred Natwick, as Mme. Arcati, had close encounters with a nether world in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit.

One secret must be disclosed. John Wood is stupendous. He can crack a syllable like kindling across his tongue and start a bonfire of hilarity coursing through the house. He walks as if his legs were malingering splints. The theater as a metaphor for murder is the ironic undertheme of the play. It stands out in bold relief on Wood's face. Well, in popular U.S. mythology, are not the playwrights the victims and the critics the assassins? If you care to assassinate yourself with laughter, try Deathtrap.

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