Cast members rehearse a scene from Cascades Theatrical Company’s production of Agatha Christie's “Murder on the Nile” on Thursday at Cascades Theatre in Bend.

Mystery writer and playwright Agatha Christie, whose many novels and story collections are still in print, needs little in the way of an introduction. Over 100 years after she began publishing, Christie, who died in 1976, remains the best-selling fiction author of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Rick Jenkins, co-director of Christie’s “Murder on the Nile,” opening this weekend at Cascades Theatrical Company’s Cascades Theatre in Bend, has spent a lot of time lately diving deep into Christie’s world.

Christie wrote a prolific number of novels and short stories, and most people don’t think of her as a playwright, Jenkins said, despite the fact that she wrote more than 20 plays. Christie penned the novel “Death on the Nile” before she wrote the play “Murder on the Nile.”

“After she wrote the book, she said she thought it had possibilities for the stage,” Jenkins said. Ask him about the mystery, in which murder occurs during a Nile riverboat voyage, and he may answer with details about Christie’s life: from her upper-middle class childhood to her family’s loss of wealth to her education, marital aspirations and disappointments.

We first meet the characters as they board the boat that will take them down the Nile. There’s the newlyweds, Simon (played by Jackson Dean) and Kay (Elyse Edwards). There’s Jacqueline (Alexandra Cerussi), Simon’s bitter former fiancee, along with a host of other travelers, among them Canon Pennyfather (Andrew Ledyard), who happens to have been the best friend of Kay’s father, and is something of a sleuth himself.

Once the boat sets sail, murder occurs, and there are more than a few among the passengers who have both motive and means to have done it, a must for a locked-room mystery. When you watch “Murder on the Nile,” if you know anything about Christie, as Jenkins does, you begin to also see aspects of Christie herself in some of them.

“The two people who were maybe the most important to (Christie) growing up were her older sister and her mother,” Jenkins said.

“She sees the dark side of both of them. She can see that in practically anyone, including herself, and we see it in this play. There’s multiple Agatha Christies out there on the stage, and one of them is pretty dark. If you stay for the second act, you find out just how dark.” (If you want to get on the same page Jenkins is, he strongly urges you to pick up the Christie biography he’s been reading, Lucy Worsley’s “Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman.”)

More icing on an already well-frosted cake: The costumes alone could whisk you to the 1933 setting of the show, but furthering the cause is the production’s lavish set, with silhouetted palms and pyramids, travel posters and pharaoh paintings that conjure an early 20th-century river voyage on the Nile.

According to CTC’s board president, Chris Mehner, more than 40 actors auditioned for “Murder on the Nile.”

“There’s so much new talent coming into Bend,” Mehner said. Same with CTC’s next main show, “You Can’t Take it With You,” opening May 26, which drew another 40 auditioners.

“I would say maybe 60% of them, maybe higher, are all brand new,” Mehner said. “The talent is amazing. That’s what we’re excited about, is to see all these new faces, and really talented faces.”

What: Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Nile”

When: Opens 7:30 p.m. Friday; additional performances 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, till April 9

Where: Cascades Theatre, 148 NW Greenwood Ave., Bend 

Cost: $29, $27 students and seniors

Contact: cascadestheatrical.org or 541-389-0803