Life at Pleasant Valley Retirement Home may have been peaceful enough for its elderly residents, even after single resident Howard Phelps creates some excitement after discovering Viagra and keeping the single women in the community on the run from his lechery. But that distasteful behavior began to pale shortly after Lowell Thackery and his sister Sybil moved in.

“There are two married couples living at the retirement home,” said Lew Kadushin, who plays the role of Douglas Thompson. “One couple is Douglas and Bernice Thompson, and the other is Lowell and Sybil Thackery, who move into a two-bedroom unit pretending to be brother and sister.”

Indeed, as many of the residents suspected, the Thackerys are not at all who they seem to be.

Mike Murphy plays Lowell Thackery, a con man, and his wife Sybil is played by Judy Hearn.

“My character’s wife, Sybil, is slightly demanding. OK, she’s very demanding,” said Murphy. “Lowell needs a lot of money to keep Sybil happy, and so he is out to scam anyone he can for as much as he can get.”

Sybil is no innocent bystander. The couple operates as a team to deceive the wealthiest residents and get as much of their retirement money as they can. Sybil targets the wealthy men and Lowell the wealthy women.

Hearn, who plays the role of a con artist married to a con artist, is in her element.

“If you go out into the lobby after the show and people tell you they hated you, you know you’ve done it right,” she said.

Throughout all of the drama, Mildred Rice is on high alert, watching as the scams unfold.

Although Mildred (played by Melissa Dasher, who is also the current president of Players) acts like a nosy person, it’s not so she can gossip. It’s much more benign than that.

“Mildred likes to know everything that’s going on, but in a motherly, protective kind of way,” said Dasher. “In the end, Mildred finds herself willing to do things she never imagined she would do – to keep everyone (and their retirement money) safe.”

Dasher has spent most of her time in Players behind the scenes, working props, designing sets, and making sure everything is where it needs to be as the play unfolds. She said the most challenging thing about this rare appearance onstage is trying to memorize a lot of lines.

“It gets harder as you age to remember the lines,” she said, “but muscle memory comes into play.” Not literal muscle memory, but all the little cues that make dialogue flow – where the actors are located on the stage, the set itself, the lines of other actors all help keep the dialog moving along.

Director Jerry Gietka has decades of experience in theater, including both acting and directing, which he’s been doing since the mid-1950s. A resident of Ocean Pines, he has directed plays for Ocean Pines Players and Possum Point Players in Georgetown, Delaware. But this is the first time he has participated in a production for Community Players of Salisbury. His style of directing is a bit unusual.

“Even my auditions are different,” said Gietka. “There’s no script. Instead, I place a few books on a table – a Bible, the U.S. Constitution, random kinds of publications. It’s not the words that matter to me. It’s how they are presented.”

Yet somehow, it never turns out quite the way he envisions it.

“Since I only want to work with creative people, that means I have to let them be creative,” Gietka said, “and it always turns out better than I imagined it. The whole is better than the parts. It becomes everyone’s show.”

“I love this group of people,” said Gietka. “They have done everything I asked of them and more. They are a director’s dream, even the newbies.”