Wicked Lit is this very cool event which takes place every year around Halloween, and it is something I always look forward to getting the opportunity to experience. It is quite a unique experience. For those who are new to my blog and may not have read my past posts about the Wicked Lit experience I will give a brief summery of what it is and what it is about before I go into a more detailed review about this years event.
Wicked Lit which is part of a group known as Unbound Productions, is a performance of three short plays most of which have been adapted from classical short ghost stories (or otherwise horror or Gothic tales) which are preformed on the grounds of the Mountain View Cemetery. This it not your normal play watching experience, beyond the fact that it is held within a cemetery at night. It has a very interactive element to it so the viewers are not just aloof observers watching what is happening, but they are drawn into it, made to feel as if they are in fact in some way a part of the action. In addition you don’t jut go, and sit and watch the performance on a stage. They use the entire of the grounds of the cemetery and mausoleum and for different scenes the actors will move throughout the grounds and the audience follows along after them. Along with the plays there is a courtyard area where you start, and regather after every play and there is this little interactive experience which happens there. It is a sort of pre-show prior to every play and while each of the three stories that are preformed are very different from each other, the pre-show usually has a theme which does tie the three plays together.
This year the pre-show was based upon Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The System of Doctor Tar and Professor Fether” and as part of “The System” the doctor came up with this new treatment for patients in which the patients were indulged in their various different disillusions instead of contradicted or punished for their behavior they were encouraged. Each of the three plays were presented as if they were being preformed by patients of the asylum expressing the dark side of their psyches. So it was kind of interesting that in the performance there was this self-awareness of the fact that it was a performance and in that way it almost was like stories within a story.
This year the stories which were preformed were
In the Grove by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
The Ebony Frame by Edith Nesbit
In the Grove was the one story I was not familiar with or hadn’t previously read. It is a Japanese ghost story about a mother whose son-in-law is killed by a bandit, and her daughter who was with him went missing, and no one knows what became of her. The mother goes to a priestess and obtains magic stones which allow her to summon the dead and so she speaks to the three ghosts of the bandit, her son-in-law and her daughter and each one tells their versions of events as to what happened.
There were some interesting things done with this story. This story started out within the cemetery, which is always fun, and there is this one scene in which the Bandit is hung for the murder of the son-in-law, and as the audience is lead away to the next scene, we walk under the hanging body which was kind of creepy and cool. There was also this cool little outdoor hallway (I know there is an architectural term for this but I cannot think of it now) that we walked through to get to the next scene which was very cool. The story itself, while it was performed well, and had aspects of it that were interesting, it was not a particularly scary story really and I did feel that it started to drag a bit where you did just want to already get to the point.
Fall of the House of Usher was needless to say the most eerie of all the stories. It is hard to go wrong with Poe, and needless to say this was my favorite performance. This one had the coolest and creepiest effects. It was performed within the mausoleum and they did some really cool things with projecting images upon the walls and had some cool lighting and sound effects. I will say though that I felt that the story became somewhat confusing to really follow. It has been a long time since I have read Usher and so my mind is foggy on some of the details, and I don’t remember exactly how it ended. As part of the performance of this play they had this narrative voice where you just hear voices coming from different parts of the mausoleum but it was very echoey so it was hard to hear what was actually being said so I feel that while the atmosphere was really good in this one, the actual storytelling was lost a bit.
The Ebony Frame is a story about a man who recently inherits a mansion from his aunt and while he is going through the house he finds this portrait of a beautiful woman whom he becomes enamored with and feels as if he knows her though he does not recognize her. as it happens many lifetimes ago they were lovers, and she made a deal with the devil so that she was trapped within the picture and could return to her lover should he find her picture and wish her back into life. But there is of course a catch, for them to be together he has to agree to sell his soul to Satan.
One thing I did not mention is that each of the plays has a guide, who is in character in some way that fits in with the story being told who serves to lead the audience where they where supposed to go from scene to scene, and they sometimes interact with the audience to bring them into the play in a way. The guide for the story of the Ebony Frame, was my favorite of the three. She was really awesome in her performance. She had the greatest facial expressions and even while acting out this at times eccentric role she could look someone dead in the eyes with this stone cold look on her face that could be unnerving. And for the play she was in the character of a maid who was leading us on a tour of the mansion.
Like the House of Usher this story did do some cool things with effects and while I felt that the performance was a good one on the whole, the characters were made much more over the top within the play than they were in the story. The main character in the play was portrayed as this buffoon and prior to his becoming bewitched by the woman in the portrait he was engaged to a young woman who is also made out to look like a bit of a buffoon. In addition within the original story the man did very much love his fiance prior to meeting the woman in the portrait, but in the play they make him indifferent towards her. For some reason the play felt the need to give the story a much more comedic twist than it had, as well it seems as make the main characters much less sympathetic than they were in the original story. Perhaps the play felt that they needed to make the characters feel as if they deserved the fates they got. But I do think they went a bit too over the top with it.
But all in all it was still a very fun and very cool experience.
The Dark Matters 