Deathtrap—a sweet chocolate bon-bon of a play, spiked with arsenic. Quite the kickoff for Las Vegas Little Theatre’s fall season. This “comedy-thriller” follows a once-successful playwright who receives a brilliant play from a novice playwright. The seasoned veteran decides to murder the rookie and pass off the play as his own. The thrills, and comedy, come when the plan spirals out of control.

“I love Deathtrap,” director Shawn Heckler enthuses. “It’s just one of those exciting shows you don’t always get to get your hands on.” A few of Hecker’s other thoughts ...

Lighting: “I wanted to approach this from a cinematic standpoint, in that I wanted to focus the lighting and focus some of the imagery and tighten it down like you would in a film.”

The cast: “There’s a lot of really great reversals in the play, but it requires you to sort of steer your audience—and in turn, steer your actors—in a particular direction before you can shift gears. I really lucked out with my cast, because they understand the beats in this play, the structure.”

The score: “We’ve got Gregg Gerrietts doing an original score for us, and it’s really aggressive music. [Heckler and Gerriets have worked together before—Gerriets composed the score for Heckler’s Morphotic with Insurgo Theater last year.] “We talk the same language artistically. So I’ll give him some generic frou-frou artsy-fartsy words that pop to mind and he runs off and does his thing and comes back and blows my mind every time.”