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With a Killer Onstage and a Body Part in the Back, the Show Went On

Fourteen years ago in Orange County, Calif., Daniel Wozniak killed two people: Sam Herr, a 26-year-old Army veteran and neighbor, and Julie Kibuishi, a 23-year-old student and Herr’s close friend. Wozniak was convicted of the murders, received a death sentence and is serving time on death row, though California has a moratorium on executions.

Those circumstances alone would be enough to adapt the case into a play in our true-crime-loving era. But additional details about the heinous murders shoot a cold dose of evil through that old theater maxim “The show must go on.”

Wozniak performed twice in a community theater production of the musical “Nine” as Guido, the ladies-man lead, in the hours after the separate shootings of Kibuishi and Herr, whom he also dismembered and whose savings he wanted. Investigators found Herr’s torso inside the theater where Wozniak and his fiancée, Rachel Buffett, had performed in the show. Buffett was later convicted of lying to the police about the murders.

What kind of person would gamely act between gruesome acts? That’s the question Ryan Spahn set out to explore in his darkly comic new play, “Inspired by True Events,” running through Aug. 4 at Theater 154 in the West Village, in an Out of the Box Theatrics production.

Directed by Knud Adams, the show takes place inside a community theater’s intimate green room, where Mary (Dana Scurlock), a mama bear stage manager, helps the actors Colin (Jack DiFalco), Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) and Robert (Lou Liberatore) prepare for the play-within-the-play. The audience of 35 (seated on chairs inside the theater’s green room) watches the humdrum thrum of a dressing room: Mary makes coffee, Colin showers, Eileen puts on her wig, Robert steams his costume. That is until Robert finds a duffel bag that reeks of Colin’s gym clothes — and it’s no spoiler to say that what’s in the bag are not Colin’s gym clothes.