Editor's note:  Our final production of the 2011-12 season will be the world premiere of Slippery as Sin, written by none other than Passage's Associate Artistic Director, David White.  David is best known to Passage Audiences for his wicked sense of humor as exhibited in last season's smash hit, Blood: A Comedy.  We've asked him to comment on his new play.

Sometime in 2002 I was watching a news program and one of the pundits said, “Since 9-11, America has become an old dark house.”  The image instantly rang true for me. We were suddenly living in a world of evil masterminds that hid in the shadows and had grand designs for world domination. Naturally, I thought…WHAT A GREAT IDEA FOR A COMEDY!

It’s taken me ten years to actually sit down and write the thing, but Slippery as Sin will open in May of 2012 on the Passage Mainstage with my favorite actress, June Ballinger, playing a phony medium. Phony mediums are, of course, one of the staples of the old dark house mystery – a genre that includes novels, films, plays…you name it. While the finer details may vary, the rules of the stories seldom change. In addition to phony mediums, you’ve got a young ingénue about to inherit an estate, a butler who seems to know more than he’s willing to admit and any number of shadowy figures reaching through doorways, windows and bookcases.

Agatha Christie popularized the genre by turning the stories into intellectual puzzles but the original examples were far less sophisticated. John Willard’s play The Cat and the Canary opened on Broadway in February of 1922 and introduced the basic template of the genre. Cyrus West is a wealthy eccentric who decrees that his will isn’t to be read until 20 years after his death. As the play begins, his relatives converge on West’s mansion to find out which of them will inherit his estate. Various horrifying hijinks ensue. My challenge as a writer was to take all these elements and twist them in a way that reflected the culture we’re living in right now in 2012 - when people are increasingly choosing superstition over scientific fact and conspiracy theories are shaping national policy. Words like “proof” and “evidence” have taken on increasingly dubious definitions.

Cat and the Canary ran for two years on Broadway and was followed by a number of similar Hollywood productions. Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novel The Circular Staircase was filmed as The Bat  and became a popular success. Pioneering film director D.W. Griffith got into the act with his film One Exciting Night and Cat and the Canary ultimately wound up being filmed four times. With the advent of sound, James Whale offered up on the final word on the genre with his classic dark comedy, the simply titled The Old Dark House.  As movies became cheaper to make, film studios like the Chicago-based Monogram Studio began cranking films out at a shocking rate. Many of these were slow, laborious duds but many of them still retain a creaky charm. If you’d like to prepare yourself for May’s production of Slippery as Sin, take a look at The 13th Guest, featuring a young Ginger Rogers before she started kicking up her heels with Fred Astaire. It’s a neat little film – barely over an hour long – and it’s a suitable enough time waster for the Halloween season.