Into the darkness at the Pinnacle Playhouse

By Liam Kavanagh-Bradette

Something dark is happening at the Pinnacle playhouse.

In its 60 anniversary season, the Belleville Theatre Guild is bringing back Frederick Knot’s Wait Until Dark, a terrifying thriller, which has not been performed in Belleville since 1971.

Taking place in 1960’s Greenwich Village, New York City, Knott pits Suzy, a vulnerable young blind woman at the mercy of three murderous drug dealing conmen who are searching for a doll filled with heroin that was smuggled in from Canada by Suzy’s unknowing husband.

Directed by Steve Forrester, Wait Until Dark opens on Feb. 2 and runs through the 18, 2012.

“So far anyone who’s sat through a rehearsal has really enjoyed it, they’re very taken by the last act,” said Forrester. “When they made it into a movie it was rated as one of the scariest endings of any film ever made.”

Forrester explained that the play was originally written at the end of the 1950s, prior to the feminist movement, and that as the director he felt that it was important to give the play a more contemporary ending.

“We have a blind woman being terrorized by these bad guys, at the same time she is being controlled by a pushy husband,” said Forrester. “We’ve changed the end, the play is written so that in the very last scene she gropes around blindly trying to find him. Instead, I felt it would be better if at the end she holds out her hand and he walks to over to her.”

Forrester says he made this change because he see’s Suzy as one of the strongest female characters he knows. “We have a talented cast and I’m sure that it will be a real success at the box office.”