Phantasmagoria

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.

The Place We Built

Last night, I saw The Flea Theater's wonderful production of The Place We Built by Sarah Gancher. The play takes the audience on a moving journey through recent history in Hungary, erupting in a riotous party along the way.

The story of The Place We Built gets filtered through the character of Aisha (Isabelle Pierre), an American woman living in Hungary. Aisha is documenting on film the government's efforts to shut down the Seagull, a Budapest nightlife hotspot that has also become a center for political dissent.

A rag-tag assembly of the Seagull's founders try to decide whether or not to stay in their cramped building while a mass of police assemble outside, ready to break arms if they need to in order to shut down the club. Julia (Cleo Gray) is intent on staying, but others favor abandoning the space in order to survive and fight again another day.

The play then flashes back to the history of the Seagull, which begins when Ben (Tom Costello) throws a "Grandma Party" inviting his friends to his grandmother's old flat. Squatting in the abandoned building, they wear the dead woman's old wigs and read aloud from her very personal letters. A heart-rending tale of the grandmother's survival in Budapest's Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust gets filtered through 20-something hipsters, and the result is oddly effective.

Most moving is a song composed by a closeted gay musician, Mihaly (Brendan Dalton), utilizing the text of one of the grandmother's letters. Music joyously erupts a number of times in this production, and my one regret about the show was that there wasn't more of it.

While some of the characters in the play tend to blur together (there are only so many variations on young, sexy, idealistic artist), Mihaly stands out. In a New York City where Gay Pride has corporate sponsors and same-sex marriage is a legal right, it can be easy to forget that there are places that seem very much like our own city, but where appearing in public with a partner is an act of near-suicidal bravery.

Danya Taymor does a deft job directing the piece, and Claudia Brown's costumes wonderfully evoke the Bohemian atmosphere of the Seagull. The play also utilizes some delightful puppets designed by Marte Johanne Ekhougen.

The Place We Built is only running through May 30th, so see it while you still can. For more information, visit:

The Flea

Smoke

Last night I saw Smoke by Kim Davies. Tom Costello directed this wonderful production at The Flea Theater starring Stephen Stout and Madeleine Bundy. The play rework's August Strindberg's Miss Julie, resetting the story in a Manhattan kitchen while an S&M sex party is raging just outside the door.

My first thought upon hearing about the show was... why? The sadomasochism in Miss Julie is pretty explicit, but what makes the play so powerful is that the two main characters don't always know when they're playing a role. How would that work when translated to the modern BDSM community which is usually as careful as possible to create the safest environment it can for participants?

Davies' answer is to make the safe environment unsafe--to have characters playing power roles both inside and outside of the scenes they enact with each other. This might not help the reputation of the BDSM community, but it makes for some very interesting drama.

As Julie, the privileged daughter of a famous art photographer, Bundy immediately projects an air of self-consciousness, an affected naivete one sees so often in the children of the rich. Toward the beginning of the play, instead of lighting her own cigarette, she pretends to be afraid of the lighter in an effort to coax a handsome man into lighting it for her. She acts the part of the beginning smoker, but we soon see she knows precisely what she's doing. The games begin.

Stout plays John, an aspiring artist who works as an intern for Julie's father. The ringing bell in Strindberg's Miss Julie is replaced in this production by John's cell phone, which periodically goes off with late-night calls from his boss making ridiculous requests. John informs us he's a dom, but he is clearly submissive to his alpha-male employer. His kink, by the way, is knives. Though I'm informed the props were "professionally dulled" for this production, they look as razor sharp as the characters' verbal barbs.

The design for the show is excellent, but most impressive is Lee Kinney's sound design, which realistically provides ambient noise from the next room, growing louder each time the kitchen door is opened. Jesse Geguzis provides the fight choreography, and like a good S&M participant, makes what is safe feel dangerous.

If you're interested in seeing Smoke, it's playing through November 9th at The Flea. More information here:

The Flea Theater