Barely six months after closing one of the Pasadena Playhouse's biggest hits in its hundred-plus year history, the same creative team is already back on that stage. Director Darko Tresnjak and actor Jefferson Mays, who together turned Peter Shaffer's Amadeus into a sellout so big the theatre added extra shows and sold those out too, have returned with Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit, running through October 4.

Producing artistic director Danny Feldman didn't wait around to make it happen. "Theater is a team sport, and when you've got a winning team, you want to keep playing together," he said, explaining why the reunion came together so fast. It was actually during tech rehearsals for Amadeus that Tresnjak first mentioned his fondness for The Visit to Feldman, a play he'd directed once before, back in college. He calls it the reason he ended up in theatre at all.

What The Visit Is About

The play, adapted by Maurice Valency in 1956, follows Claire Zachanassian, now the richest woman alive, returning to her hometown of Güllen, a town on the edge of financial collapse. She's willing to bail everyone out. There's a catch. Someone has to kill Anton Schill, the man who got her pregnant and abandoned her decades ago, and Mays plays him.

Tresnjak resists calling it any one thing. "I don't want to call it a feminist revenge fantasy because that belittles it," he said, describing it instead as part inverted medieval mystery play, part stage thriller. Dürrenmatt originally wrote it as a jab at Swiss neutrality after World War II, and Tresnjak says the parallels to institutional complicity feel uncomfortably current. He mentioned directing a scene about a townsperson urging resistance the same day news broke of pressure on the American Bar Association over its diversity efforts, and how it made him think Güllen's residents were, in some ways, better positioned than people are today.

Mays Isn't Sure He's Right For It

Mays, who has a Tony and an Obie and is used to playing dozens of characters inside one show, admitted Anton is a strange fit for him. "A strangely passive and reactive role that I'm still not sure I'm entirely right for," he said, adding he could name ten actor friends better suited to it. What sold him was Tresnjak's conviction. He also has history worrying about timing. His 2007 Tony-winning revival of Journey's End, a World War I drama, played to empty houses because audiences were tired of war coverage from Iraq and Afghanistan. "Sometimes you hold the mirror up to the world, and it reflects it too well," he said.

Melinda Page Hamilton, known to TV audiences from Mad Men and Desperate Housewives, plays Claire opposite Mays. She's worked with Tresnjak before on other productions and says she tried and failed to get tickets to Amadeus herself.

Whether The Visit repeats that show's numbers is the open question hanging over the run through October 4.