Spend a Girl’s Night Out with the Women of “Smell of the Kill”

Civic’s Managing Artistic Director, Lynn Kinkade was looking for an opportunity to showcase the wealth of female talent residing in Evansville. He found the perfect recipe in Michelle Lowe’s dark comedy, The Smell of the Kill, which fittingly serves up the final course of Civic Theatre’s 2007-2008 main season.

Around a dozen local female actors turned out for auditions in mid-March looking to score one of three delicious roles in this fast paced rollick. When confronted with the plethora of talent at auditions, Kinkade was faced with a conundrum; “what am I going to do?” he found himself asking. But as the auditions progressed, things just started falling into place, and the show found its three stars, each of whom has appeared in Civic shows in the past.

The first role to be locked in was Molly, who will be played by Cindy Maples, a transplant from Carbondale who most recently appeared in Civic’s Moon Over Buffalo. Maples spends her days as an Office Manager of a local construction company. She says, “I’m the only woman in an office full of twenty-five men. I like telling men what to do”. This attitude should serve the show well since the three women hold the fates of their husbands in their cold little hands.

Court reporter Lara Culiver found the role of Debra ironically familiar. “I got home and realized, ‘she’s me!’” claims the actress. Smell of the Kill marks Culiver’s third Civic Theatre production, having made her debut in 1987’s Baby and appearing most recently in Lend Me a Tenor in 2005. Culiver has immersed herself into community theatre productions across the Tri-State, having appeared in over 30 productions in eight years with such organizations as the Reparatory People of Evansville, The Unicorn Players, and the Henderson Community Theatre to name a few.

Appearing as the driven and angry Nicky is Kris Zinn, a stay at home mom and substitute teacher that makes appearances at Scott Elementary and Oak Hill Middle Schools. Zinn was initially worried that she would not be able to participate in the show, as she had a previous commitment to attend a mission trip to a Native American Indian Reservation with Bluegrass United Methodist Church over Spring Break with her daughter, Haley. But Kinkade saw that Zinn had the chutzpah to tackle the role of Nicky, and made the exception to cast her knowing that the veteran actress would make up the lost time when she returned based on her prior work in such Civic shows as Marriage is Murder, The Last Case of Sherlock Holmes, and A Christmas Cactus.

All three women recognized the level of talent they were up against at auditions, and none of them thought they had a shot at actually making the show. Zinn and Culiver assumed that the other actress was a shoo-in for the role they ultimately scored and Maples went home to tell her husband “I’m never going to get a part (in that show). There were so many amazing women”.

In the end, it all came down to the chemistry the actors all shared together on stage. Looking at these three women, one could believe that they would be in the same circle of friends. And one also wonders: given the same circumstances that face the three women in the play, what would these three actors do with husbands they discovered were much less than wonderful?!