Nicky’s husband embezzled $10 million and is going to jail. Molly’s husband won’t have sex with her, and she wants a baby. Debra’s husband can’t seem to sell a house, but he spends a lot of time with one of his prospective female buyers. This is what Nicky, Molly and Debra, dissatisfied suburban housewives, discuss in the kitchen one night while cleaning up after their monthly dinner party with their husbands, who are in the next room practicing putting. At least, they were in next room. But wait. What’s that banging coming from the basement? Could it be the husbands accidentally got stuck in the meat locker?

Uh oh. What’s a wife to do?

The question is one New York playwright Michele Lowe asked long before “Desperate Housewives” became this year’s hit TV show about unhappy suburban women. In Lowe’s 1999 comedy “The Smell of the Kill,” which opens Friday at the Bangor Opera House, the wives decide whether the lock-up accident in the basement is an opportunity to save their husbands or save themselves. Wouldn’t that be – gulp – murder?

You won’t find the answer here. But think about this: Maybe being a wife just ain’t what it used to be. Think “Thelma and Louise” or the more recent remake of “The Stepford Wives.” Smell a trend?

“I don’t know,” said Lowe, with a chuckle. “But I hope there’s a trend in women being portrayed as getting what they need and want. But I don’t know if that’s really happening. I cannot tell you how many people have said to me, ‘It’s not like that anymore. Women are much more fluid in their lives and can extricate themselves much more easily from a bad relationship.’ And I say: No! I don’t think it’s any easier for a woman emotionally or financially to extricate herself from a relationship. I don’t think it’s any easier than it was 25 years ago.”

On the other hand, said Lowe, who is working on a screenplay for a fiction film about disenfranchised female factory workers along the Texas-Mexico border, women have an unusual ability to interact with each other in important ways – for better or worse.

“Women are very good for each other, for supporting each other, but they also undo themselves and each other,” said Lowe. “Women really rely on each other because they have a tendency to talk and, in that intimacy and in that closeness, they can become undone or they can become more fulfilled.”

In part, that very potential between women intrigued Penobscot Theatre Company guest director Roseann Sheridan. At first she wasn’t sure she could relate to the characters, but then she realized that each woman has a “real story. They are like people I could know and probably do know,” she said.

Indeed, the women in “The Smell of the Kill” have known each other for nearly 20 years without revealing the inner secrets of their marriages. What they learn this one night could bond them forever.

“I was struck by the sense of mob mentality that goes on in the play,” said Sheridan, who teaches acting at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “At first, it’s for fun and games. But then, like any game that goes too far, it turns that corner. They lose sight of what they are really doing. I’m intrigued by the end. Will they remain friends? What do you do when you cross that line? They aren’t like Richard III who goes after revenge and wrongdoing. This is an accident that turns into an opportunity.”

Mark Torres, producing artistic director for Penobscot Theatre, chose the play because he is committed to producing contemporary work, but also because the action takes place in one room and the cast is small. (In addition to the women, three male actors deliver lines offstage but are never seen.)

One of the play’s central themes is hunting, which Torres thought might interest local audiences, especially women who often are the ones left behind during hunting season.

The men in this play don’t get hunted, however. They get trapped.

“It’s the idea that women finally get some control, and it turns the tables on who’s the prey and who’s being preyed upon and who has the advantage in unexpected ways,” said Lowe, who called her own marriage “fabulous.” “I think it becomes rather exciting and thrilling. I think these women get a thrill out of being able to figure this out, especially by the end.”

They also find new self-expression, say the three performers who portray the women.

“It’s important to have your own voice,” said Marianne Ryan, who plays Debra, the moral voice in the play. “My character takes it to an extreme place. But you don’t have to kill to find your voice.”

“It’s really a lot about protecting yourself,” said Mary Proctor, who plays Nicky and was last seen two years ago in Penobscot Theatre’s “Blithe Spirit.” “I think the lesson is about making lemonade out of lemons – taking advantage of opportunity when it walks your way. I didn’t put them in the meat locker. They walked in on their own.”

“What makes Molly feel real to me are all the little sacrifices she has made and then, here she is, stuck. How did this happen? This used to be really good, but how did I get here? It’s not fun. How did I lose track of being an intelligent woman?” said Meagan Hawkes, who performed in two previous Penobscot Theatre productions, “Three Tall Women” and “The Crucible.”

Hawkes, a graduate of Bates College, and Ryan are based in Boston. Proctor lives in New York City. The three are sharing an apartment building in Bangor while working on the show. While they clearly are having a wicked sort of fun onstage, they aren’t playing the script for laughs. Nor should they be, said Lowe.

“I always tell directors: Rehearse it as a drama, as seriously as you possibly can. The laughs will come from that. Not that it’s a farce. But you have to take these women totally seriously. I don’t write jokes. I once tried to write a comedy. It was dreadful. This all comes from drama,” said Lowe.

Originally, Torres intended to direct the Penobscot Theatre Company production, but administrative duties crowded his calendar, and he turned the work over to Sheridan. His goal for the production remains the same: “We want people to have fun. We want people to sit back for an hour and go with us.”

As producer, Torres keeps his distance from the rehearsal process, but, at a dress rehearsal on a recent night, he laughed boisterously. He calls the play “a truth-or-dare slumber party,” but also said that, behind the comic device, he recognizes a serious statement about anger boiling just below the surface of some relationships.

The men in the cast – Mike Abernathy, Rich Kimball and Chris Newcomb, who never appear onstage – agreed. Loser husbands are a reality, they said, and the ending of the play offers one solution to insensitive, thoughtless, demanding husbands.

“They need to be put in their place,” said Newcomb. “They are guys doing what guys get away with. These women are trapped in their lives, and they want out. They shouldn’t get to the point where they kill their husbands but … .” Here, he shrugged his shoulders as if to say: Some things are inevitable.

In addition to praising their female cast members, the guys were discussing the time conflict between this Sunday’s matinee and the Super Bowl. But that didn’t stop them from getting the point of the play. Which, the entire cast assured, is for both sexes.

“I’m so curious how women there relate to it and how men will relate to it. One of the greatest joys about ‘The Smell of the Kill’ is that men laughed as hard as the women,” said Lowe, who had her Broadway debut with the play in 2002.

“I hope it reaches out to women. I think a lot of women still feel this way. I think ‘Desperate Housewives’ appeals to women for the same reasons this play does. There are a lot of unsatisfied women in this country,” said Ryan. “What have I learned? I’ve learned it’s very powerful to hold a gun.”

Penobscot Theatre Company will present Michele Lowe’s “The Smell of the Kill” in preview tonight at 7 p.m., opening 8 p.m. Feb. 4 and running through Feb. 13 at the Bangor Opera House, 131 Main St. For information, call 942-3333, or visit www.penobscottheatre.org. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.