Those who mistakenly think Ira Levin only wrote female victims never saw Veronica's Room. (Or Interlock. Or Drat! The Cat! Or...)

“ ‘Dark’ and ‘shocking’ aren’t strong enough words. A toast to Veronica’s Room – still creepy after almost 50 years.”
    —Pamela Briggs (River Cities' Reader, 2022)

Credit: Mark Wyville

We can't disclose too much of the plot – which plays out in real time over the course of a single evening – except to say that co-ed Susan Kerner agrees to impersonate the long-dead sister of an elderly at-death's-door spinster, to monumentally bad effect.

Too shocking for 1973, Levin's dark-as-night theatrical frightener continues to enjoy global popularity both here and around the globe (South America, China, the Middle East...) due to its universal themes of gaslighting and repression – to name two of the milder offenses at hand.

It's also a favorite among colleges and universities, with two of its four-member ensemble cast being college-aged.

“You find yourself trapped in someone else's nightmare.”
    —Newhouse Newspapers, 1973

With Veronica's Room, Levin truly outdid himself, crafting a Rubik's Cube within a kaleidoscope – whose four ensemble roles constitute some of the most complex in the theater canon, given the myriad layers of structural complexity that underpin them.

Credit: UCF School of Performing Arts

Veronica's Room opened on Broadway in October of 1973 at the Music Box Theatre – where Deathtrap would play five years later – and was revived off-Broadway in 1981 at New York's Provincetown Playhouse.