Just Wrought

The Bardo of The Salted Wife

Is it possible to engender genuine horror in an audience through a live stage experience?  That is the standing question for this series of scripts, excerpts and essays which I will be posting throughout this  Halloween season.

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Sometimes a piece of theatre is crafted specifically and solely as a work of horror.  In recent times, The Woman in Black leaps to mind, but we should also remember that the Grand Guignol in Paris was one of the most successful and longest running commercial theaters of all time. 

More often, a play will contain components of horror while the larger story lands squarely in the territory of tragedy, e.g. Hamlet or MacBeth. And sometimes, but much more rarely, horror rears its head in a comedy, like my own reincarnation romp, An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show. It is early in the play, and things are cooking along nicely in full farce fashion, as game show host Blink Bodie yucks it up with contestants and Spokesmodels, when suddenly a solid wall of stylized terror stops the fun cold, and, ideally, disorients the audience enough that I can start to really —ahem—“muck” with them.

Ripped right out of Howard Zinn’s  absolutely essential A Peoples History of the United States, this section is my attempt at staging one of the nastiest tidbits from our nation’s nascent colonization. This isn’t legend.  Zinn cites the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia legislature for this piece of history. So it seems consuming others for one’s one survival and delectation is as old, if not older, as the idea of America itself.

 

Often Lie

Is it possible to engender genuine horror in an audience through a live stage experience? 

That’s the question I started pondering a decade or so ago. Now don’t knee-jerk back some glib response. Think before you answer, and be honest. I have given a lot of thought to this, and I am still not completely sure. So this Halloween season I thought I would crack open the question again for churning with a series of scripts, excerpts and essays, in hopes that together we might strike some undiscovered insights.

Let me kick it off with “Often Lie”, a very short play I wrote for the late-night horror series Psychopomp Presents. . ., which was produced by Paul Morgan Stetler and myself, and directed by Braden Abraham, at Capitol Hill Arts Center in October 2005 .  We billed the show thusly:

A late night modicum of mayhem featuring world premiere plays penned to plumb the very depths of the collective unconscious.  "Lil' Heroes" "Often Lie" and "The Reckoning" are works by three of Seattle's most innovative playwrights: Louis Broome, Paul Mullin and Stephanie Timm.  Come on, give your dark side a joy ride!

It was a failure.  But one of the very best kind, a true experiment wherein a hypothesis was advanced, a test was run, and data was extracted.  Our data read something like: “You cannot scare drunk hipsters after 11 pm no matter how hard you try.” 

The idea for my contribution “Often Lie” was essentially, “What if two random people met and discovered they were having each other's dreams?” From here I began lightly building in my favorite freest fashion, by just randomly associating and seeing where it takes me. I thought of Queen Mab and went back to read Mercutio's famous rant. Spiders seemed to be prominent in that speech, so I let that take me further on. I leave it to you to find the connections, such as they are. I soon decided that only one of the characters should be dreaming the other's dream, thus leaving more opportunity to explore the "who's dreaming who?" question. I landed on a sort of Donald-Rumsfeld-meets-Queen-Mab scenario which pleased me. I think, given the right circumstances, it might possibly frighten an audience that wasn’t simply looking to laugh and get drunker before getting laid.

For its world premiere, I was blessed to have the dream casting of Michael Patten as “Drum” and Stephanie Shine as “Mabel”.

Here’s the play: