Playwright K.C. Cooper said now seems like the right time for a certain kind of comedy: a decidedly dark one, crammed with twists and turns and driven by the human appetite for sin. Cooper’s original play “Floored!” opens Friday night at Magenta Theater in downtown Vancouver. The story centers on Wall Street fat cats. “They are all awful people, and they get their comeuppance,” said Cooper, who also directs the play. Cooper, a Magenta veteran of many theatrical roles and countless comedy-improv outings over the past dozen years, said “Floored!” is a silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic. When all her theater activities stopped cold and she had to stay home, the Lake Oswego, Ore., resident started going “a little wiggy,” she recalled. “I am not good at just sitting around,” she said, adding that her approach to life is to keep trying “the next scary thing.”

That’s what motivated Cooper to audition for her first Magenta play when she hadn’t done theater since high school, she said. Appearing in “Over the River and Through the Woods” in 2011 changed her life, she said. She got busy acting in as many as three plays per year. These days, Cooper works with other regional theaters too, and with four different comedy-improv groups. “Why did I wait so long?” is what Cooper said she wonders now. During that first pandemic summer, a cooped-up Cooper dove into writing a screwball crime-caper story, which concerns two couples whose fortunes crater in the financial crisis of 2008. She was inspired by past masters of comic thrillers from novelist Donald Westlake to filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, as well as by recent outrages of lies and excess at our society’s top levels, she said. “Not seeing some people get their comeuppance, some very bad people, has been frustrating,” Cooper said. Creating fictitious scenarios where scoundrels get exactly what they’ve earned was fun and satisfying, she said. Storyboarding the complicated, unpredictable plot took months of concentration, she said. “I wanted to keep people on the edge of their seats until the very last word,” she said.

After that, she was surprised at how easily the writing itself tumbled out. Even more fun and satisfying than doling out justice in her plot has been working with a stellar Magenta cast and crew, she said, which she was able to hand pick as director. Set designers Michael Braddock and Heather Harmon created a pair of swanky Manhattan apartments separated by an elevator with working doors, Cooper said. Costumer Ahmad Santos added just the right touch of conspicuous personal glitz. Sound and music designer Steve Goodwin supplied an interstitial tune that takes on different colors and styles for each of the nine characters. Cooper said she kept thinking, “Oh my god, these are the very words I wrote,” as the actors stepped into their roles. Whenever any line seemed problematic or in need of revision, Cooper said she enjoyed hollering: “What the hell was the author thinking?” If anything, Cooper said, she had to keep encouraging her stable of truly nice actors to “bump up the badness” in their portrayals. “More sleazy! More obsessed! More nervous!” she would tell them, she recalled with a laugh.

When actor Logan Cannon once responded, “I’m really not such a despicable person,” Cooper replied that he should have a blast becoming someone he’s not. “There are little bits of redemption” for some of the wicked characters, Cooper added, especially for a pair of lovable, bumbling burglars, one of whom employs ridiculously erudite speech that breaks into Brooklynese when he’s stressed. “There are no hearts and flowers at the ending,” she said. “The plot keeps twisting and turning until the last line.”