Review: ATC’s ‘Heist’ will have you guessing and looking for clues

By Cathalena E. Burch. Originally published on Tucson.com

You can’t trust thieves.

Even thieves can’t trust thieves.

Just ask the crew of jewelry thieves in Arizona Theatre Company’s American premiere of Arun Lakra’s new thriller Heist.

One of them has deceived the others, switching out a real precious stone for a fake and setting off a get-even-and-get-rich plot of revenge.

Ok, we’re stopping here.

We promised ourselves no spoilers.

Figuring out the whodunnit is the whole point of Heist; you have to see this with an open mind. No expectations. No hints or suppositions.

No spoilers.

Here’s what we can tell you: Heist is a fun ride filled with twists and turns you won’t see coming.

Some of you might think you have it figured out. There might be little hints along the way, details that at first glance seem unimportant. Barely worth noting. 

Pay attention.

Canadian playwright Lakra drops breadcrumbs early, but they’re tiny. Hardly noticeable. 

This is arguably the most unique and most ambitious play ATC has put on its stage in recent memory. The high-tech production, helmed by Kasser Family Artistic Director Matt August, plays like a movie, with fabulous lighting effects and a video wall used to create flashback scenes that fill in the character backgrounds.

You have the ringleader Marvin (Matthew Floyd Miller); Angie (Jessica Fishenfeld), aka The Mary-Lou femme fatale; Ryan (Brandon Ruiter), the smooth-talking “Gilligan”; Kruger (Ethan Henry), the tech expert “Popeye”; and Fiona (Jynx Zavala), “the Geek” hacker. 

Then there’s The Spider (Valerie Perri). 

Ah The Spider.

Nope. Not gonna go there. 

Heist might not be as sophisticated as Oceans 11, a movie that inspired Lakra when he was commissioned to write the play in 2021. It has some special effects including a drone used to pull off one of the heists and the video wall that flashes back to what happened leading up to … 

Nope, not going there. 

We will say that at times, those flashback scenes got a little tedious. In a film, they’d flesh those scenes out for context. In the play, they were one- or two-minute interruptions that added to the action, but sometimes distracted like that one scene where Marvin and The Mary-Lou were discussing Ryan’s role …

Oh, dang.

Almost went there.  

Curiously the timing of Heist comes as the world is focused on one of the biggest heists in recent history, the mid-October theft of $102 million in jewels from the Gallery of Apollo at Paris’s Louvre Museum. 

Four thieves used a mechanical ladder to break into the museum in broad daylight, steal the jewels and escape on motor scooters in less than seven minutes.

ATC’s Heist took about two hours with one 15-minute intermission.