Fourteen years ago in Orange County, Calif., Daniel Wozniak killed two people: Sam Herr, a 26-year-old Army veteran and neighbor, and Julie Kibuishi, a 23-year-old student and Herr’s close friend. Wozniak was convicted of the murders, received a death sentence and is serving time on death row, though California has a moratorium on executions.
Those circumstances alone would be enough to adapt the case into a play in our true-crime-loving era. But additional details about the heinous murders shoot a cold dose of evil through that old theater maxim “The show must go on.”
Wozniak performed twice in a community theater production of the musical “Nine” as Guido, the ladies-man lead, in the hours after the separate shootings of Kibuishi and Herr, whom he also dismembered and whose savings he wanted. Investigators found Herr’s torso inside the theater where Wozniak and his fiancée, Rachel Buffett, had performed in the show. Buffett was later convicted of lying to the police about the murders.
What kind of person would gamely act between gruesome acts? That’s the question Ryan Spahn set out to explore in his darkly comic new play, “Inspired by True Events,” running through Aug. 4 at Theater 154 in the West Village, in an Out of the Box Theatrics production.
Directed by Knud Adams, the show takes place inside a community theater’s intimate green room, where Mary (Dana Scurlock), a mama bear stage manager, helps the actors Colin (Jack DiFalco), Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) and Robert (Lou Liberatore) prepare for the play-within-the-play. The audience of 35 (seated on chairs inside the theater’s green room) watches the humdrum thrum of a dressing room: Mary makes coffee, Colin showers, Eileen puts on her wig, Robert steams his costume. That is until Robert finds a duffel bag that reeks of Colin’s gym clothes — and it’s no spoiler to say that what’s in the bag are not Colin’s gym clothes.
Over dinner near the theater recently, Spahn, 44, and Adams, 37, said they were on a breakneck rehearsal schedule to figure out how to build ominousness into a backstage-set play without making it look like a haunted-house riff on “Noises Off.”
“When the theater tries to take on genre, there’s a gravitational pull toward broad strokes or spoofs or melodrama,” Adams said. What Spahn has written, he added, “is amplifying everyday fears into something surreal.”
Spahn, an actor making his playwriting debut, said he never read about the true story to avoid recreating the particulars of the case, the better to ensure his play is respectful of the victims and “divorced from the truth.”
Spahn said an unexpected dramaturgical source was a friend, the actress Krysta Rodriguez. She went to high school with Wozniak and Kibuishi, and was involved with the Orange County Children’s Theater at the same time as Wozniak.
Rodriguez said she was in her dressing room at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where she was starring on Broadway in “The Addams Family,” when she learned that Wozniak — whom she remembered for a star turn in “Grease” at the children’s theater — had been charged.
“He was an incredibly charismatic, magnetic performer,” she said. “That doesn’t negate what he did, but no one saw it coming.”
Spahn said he called on his love of horror movies as he wrote the show, like the coldblooded possession film “It Follows,” and on lurid headlines about the case. Photos too, including snapshots of Wozniak peacocking with castmates at the closing-night party for “Nine” before his arrest.
Adams had recently watched “The Blair Witch Project” and noted similarities between how that groundbreaking 1999 found-footage horror movie and Spahn’s play patiently build dread by naturalistic means, what horror fandom would call a “slow burn.”
“What we are doing in the theater takes more training because it has to be repeatable and it’s scripted,” he said. “But that’s the effect you want, the sense that these are just real people responding to surprises.”
At about 700 square feet, the playing space is approximately the size of a studio apartment. Eight actors would fit comfortably in it as a dressing room, but as a black box it may be a tight squeeze for some audience members. Or catnip for anyone looking for a summertime scare beyond what’s at the multiplex, as the spooky Broadway play “Grey House” tried to deliver last summer.
“Our story is one of humor and adrenaline and tension,” Adams said. “Now that the Tonys mishegoss has died down, people are looking for something elevated,” apart from frothy musical revivals.
Spahn said that writing the play satiated his love of the macabre — “there’s something about a ticking time bomb mixed with a dead body part,” he said — and revealed an unnerving reality, one that horror and theater fans may find humorous, about the shape-shifting qualities it takes to be an actor, or a psychopath.
“In theater, we tend to disregard things that might paralyze others with fear because we are so used to extreme situations, like performing when we’re ill,” he said. “We just keep going.”
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