Arun Lakra

HEIST is a sizzling, twisty-mystery, popcorn-munching, edge-of-your-seat, heist-whodunnit, CLUE meets OCEANS 11 kind of show. A criminal mastermind reassembles his squad to heist a diamond from the lair of an international jewel thief, but what he’s really doing is setting an elaborate trap for whoever double-crossed them last time. 

HEIST was commissioned by Bloomington Playwrights Project (Indiana) with the goal of taking a wildly successful film genre and creating a heist story for the stage. I am pleased to report HEIST had a successful workshop production in Indiana in May, 2022, and had its World Premiere at Vertigo Theatre (380 seats) in Calgary, Canada in January-February, 2024.

HEIST was presented in 2025 as a co-production between the Citadel Theatre (600 seats) in Edmonton, Alberta and the Grand Theatre (800 seats) in London, Ontario.

HEIST will have its US Premiere at Arizona Theatre Company in December, 2025.

What is luck? Are eight consecutive Tails always just a coincidence? Is our fortune woven into our DNA? Did God need to exist for life to begin? Can a mathematical sequence reveal the secret of the universe, or at least the Super Bowl?

Sequence is an award-winning, edge-of-your-seat science thriller, where two stories intertwine like a fragment of DNA. In one thread, Time Magazine’s Luckiest Man Alive has bet on the Super Bowl coin toss 19 years in a row. And won every time. Today, he is about to risk 880 million dollars on the 20th, until he fortuitously meets a young woman who claims to have figured out his mathematical secret. Simultaneously (or so it seems), a blind professor is paid an mysterious late night visit by a student in a wheelchair, who, on his Genetics final examination, somehow got all 150 questions wrong… a 1 in 5 quintillion chance.

In this theatrical petri dish, stem cell research, God, miniskirts, Fibonacci numbers, and football, all spiral together in an intellectually sexy cocktail. Sequence inspires, delights, and surprises with its playful language, and interplay of logic and metaphysics. Belief systems clash, ideas recombine, mutate and evolve, and order springs from chaos. As the paradox of a double helical chronology unfolds, the question is asked... in our lives, in our universe, and even in our stories, does order matter?