Watching a horror story play out live on stage is inherently different from watching one on screen. In a movie, there is no end to the number of possibilities, since either practical or computer-generated effects can produce an unlimited number of severed heads, demonic apparitions, or walking corpses.
On stage, however, the limitations of physical reality can evoke a much eerier sense of fear than anything dreamed up by Hollywood producers. Any terrors you see are more than flickers of light up on the screen. They are here, now, right in front of you, in this very room. The call of horror is coming from inside the house.
That's the advantage of Jack Horton Gilbert's new play Phantasmagoria, playing now at The Tank on 36th Street. Historically, phantasmagoria were actually fore-runners of motion pictures, since they used magic lanterns to project images in front of an audience. This production, skillfully directed by Tom Costello, doesn't need projections to bring you chills, though.
Costello has a long history of developing excellent new plays, including Joshua H. Cohen's The Thirteenth Commandment and Smoke by Kim Davies. He has a knack for bringing a visceral sense of fear and suspense into a small space, which is precisely what Phantasmagoria needs. When stage lights go off during the play, we see actors by candlelight and by the beams of hand-held flashlights, as the rest of the stage is enveloped in a darkness in which anything could be happening.
The play's story is simple enough, and familiar through countless horror stories of the past. At the beginning, we see the cute and likable Pin (Paige Bakke) boarding up the windows of her house against some unknown menace outside. Her obnoxious but oddly endearing friend Otho (Tudor Postolache) shows up at her door, begging to be let in before nightfall. Something has been stalking the people of this unnamed town, taking them at night, and leaving trails of horrifying clues as to what might have happened to them.
That something could be read as a stand-in for any number of menaces emptying out small-town America, from opium addiction to economic collapse to political division. The play is less interested in what it is destroying people, though, and more interested in what our fear of it does to us. This gets illustrated by a number of young people who then arrive at Pin's house for a Halloween party that is clearly a cover for something much more sinister. Each partygoer could be an archetype of a different denizen of horror movies we all know.
We meet the mouthy Fern (Sarina Freda), the loud and threatening Maz (Michael DeFilippis), and the hot girl Isha (Maya Shoham). Joining them is an out-of-towner named Marty (Matthew Yifeng), who seems to have been invited through some less-than-pure motives. Things escalate as they all play a game called dare, which is just what it sounds like and leads to a predictable spiraling out of control. Or does it? The group of friends has a plan for this evening, and like the audience, neither Otho nor Marty knows what it is.
Watching that plan unfold, and then go horribly wrong, is part of the fun of the play. Some characters disappear, while others turn on one another, and the audience is kept guessing who--if anyone--will make it out alive.
Phantasmagoria is playing at The Tank until October 30th, so see it before it closes, then come back for Bara Swain's The Boob Tube Plays, running in The Tank's smaller space from November 2nd to 8th.
