‘The Icepick Killer’

The John Drew Theater Lab at Guild Hall will present a free staged reading of “I Married the Icepick Killer,” a new play by Carol Muske-Dukes, tomorrow at 7:30 p.m.

Ms. Muske-Dukes, a novelist, essayist, former poet laureate of California, and former part-time Springs resident, has called the play a “tragi/com.” In a piece published in The New York Times Magazine in March 2000, months before her husband, David Dukes, an actor, died of a heart attack, she compared being married to an actor to “living with someone who keeps getting kidnapped. And longs to be kidnapped.”

Her look at the constantly disrupted life of an actor’s spouse is part satiric chronicle and part magic realism, as the widow refuses to believe in her husband’s death, seeing it instead as one more opportunity for him to escape and provide inspiration for a poet’s imagination.