Passage Theatre Company Opens SLIPPERY AS SIN, 5/17

Passage Theatre Company, Trenton's only professional theater company, will wrap up its 2011-2012 season with Slippery as Sin, running from May 17 to June 3. David Lee White's comic thriller will be directed by Adam Immerwahr – the same team that delivered the 2010 smash hit, Blood: A Comedy. 

The cast will feature local actors, June Ballinger, artistic director of Passage Theatre, and Trent Blanton, a theater professor at Rider University, plus Philadelphia talent including  Joniece Abbott-Pratt , Justin Jain, Brian Anthony Wilson, and Barrymore Award winner Greg Wood.

 Jump on this roller coaster ride of comedic thrills as we look at the political paranoia and cultural hysteria in the "Dirty Thirties." America's most brilliant detective is on the verge of apprehending the world's most devious master criminal...Diabolicus! It's 1932 and a group of formerly well-to-do socialites are stranded on a former resort island gone-to-seed. The sinister and calculating Diabolicus has threatened to murder everyone in the house before daybreak…but is the master criminal lurking in The Shadows of reality or in the recesses of paranoid minds? The truth is often "Slippery as Sin."

"David White is becoming known for writing delicious smart comedies that both resonate and illuminate our times," says Passage Theatre Artistic Director June Ballinger. 

Mystery writer Kathryn Miller Haines states "Slippery as Sin masterfully integrates the tropes of early twentieth-century pulp detective fiction in a play that is scary, thrilling, clever and very, very funny." 

June Ballinger is in her 15th season as Executive Artistic Director at Passage Theatre. Most recently, she appeared onstage in David Lee White's Blood: A Comedy, and Trenton Lights, for which she was also a co-creator.  Prior to becoming a producer, she performed in many new works at theatres nationwide such as Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Actors Theatre of Louisville, Primary Stages, The Chelsea Theatre Center, and The Kennedy Center. Ms. Ballinger was a founding ensemble member of the Magic Carpet Play Company in San Francisco for ten years, and was also in the original Broadway cast of Pack of Lies starring RoseMary Harris. 

Trent Blanton's credits include Les Miserables (Actors' Playhouse), A Christmas Carol (Actors Theatre of Louisville),1776 (Ford's Theatre, Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera); Fiddler on the Roof (Starlight Musicals of Kansas City & The MUNY of St. Louis); A Christmas Carol, Romeo & Juliet (ALLIANCE THEATRE); A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew (Georgia Shakespeare); Masada (York Theatre (NYC)). Trent played virtually every major city in North America in the Broadway National Tour of Les Miserables. He was also in the Chinese premiere of Les Miz in 2002 with Colm Wilkinson at the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Trent is an Assistant Professor of Theatre in the Westminster College of the Arts at Rider University and a resident teaching artist for the McCarter Theatre.

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