Theatre Tricks (Season 13, Episode 11)
Premise: An actress’s rape during an interactive play goes unnoticed by the audience, and the trail runs through a stalker, a theater critic, a judge with a fantasy and her director.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 13, Episode 11
- Starring
- Det. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), Det. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T), Det. Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), Det. Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), Capt. Donald Cragen (Dann Florek), ADA Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March)
- Guest stars
- Jenn Proske as Meghan Weller, Fisher Stevens as Ted Scott, Kevin Pollak as Judge Gerald Crane, Adam Driver as Jason Roberts, Gayle Rankin as Holly Schneider
- Director
- Constantine Makris
- Writers
- Story: Julie Martin & Warren Leight; Story & teleplay: Marygrace O'Shea
Summary
“Theatre Tricks” opens on the first night of Nine Circles, an immersive show loosely based on Dante’s Inferno in which masked spectators wander through the sets. In the circle of lust, actress Meghan Weller, who plays Francesca, is raped by a man in a goat mask while a second man in a hawk mask holds her wrists, and the crowd takes it for part of the performance. Benson, called away from an evening of skating with Cabot, takes Meghan’s statement, and director Ted Scott says he pushed the piece too far. With 150 masked spectators and no DNA, Cragen asks whether the attack could be a publicity stunt.
Ticket records lead to Estelle Roberts, whose card paid for 12 performances. Her son, Jason, built Meghan’s website for free and has hidden cameras in her apartment. Meghan helps lure him into a meeting, where he is arrested, but his own video of the show clears him: he wore a donkey mask. A whine on the recording points to a theater critic with a rented listening headset. He admits pinning Meghan down, insists he thought it was acting, and recalls the attacker’s cuff links engraved “Sustained.” That leads to Judge Gerald Crane, who admits the encounter but says Meghan planned it as a rape fantasy in emails through the Sugarbabyz website, with “Dixie” as a safe word. His ex-wife represents him.
Meghan denies writing the emails or posting the profile that carries her photo. The messages came from a café across from the theater; Jason’s cameras give him an alibi, and the judge was elsewhere each time. Suspicion turns to Ted, who has visited Meghan for private scene work, whose ticket sales have jumped, whose first New York play was called Dixie, whose divorce Crane handled, and whose press releases share the emails’ British spellings. Ted, already working the attack into his staging, says he is the one being framed, and Cabot finds too little to charge him or the judge.
Spoiler, the ending: Going through his past sugar babies, Crane picks out a woman he met for a role play in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room shortly before the emails began: Holly Schneider, Meghan’s roommate. Faced with Meghan, who is quitting the show to go home, Holly says she slept with Ted hoping for the part Meghan was given and wanted her friend to know what it felt like to be used. Meghan realizes Holly arranged her rape. The episode ends without showing what charges Holly faces.
Why it stands out
- Adam Driver, in one of his first television guest roles, plays the stalker Jason Roberts; Kevin Pollak plays Judge Crane and Fisher Stevens the director, Ted Scott.
- The show within the episode is modeled on immersive productions such as Sleep No More, where the audience moves through the action.
- Ice-T’s wife, Coco Austin, makes her third appearance on the series as Venus, and Gilbert Gottfried plays a TARU technician.