LizAnne Keigley, Richard Large and Eric Harris in "The Chimes" at Mountain View Mausoleum and Cemetery during the 2010 Wicked Lit. Photo by Daniel Kitayama.
Theater troupe's production at the cemetery and mausoleum remains the place to go for a good scare
by Timothy Rutt
Wicked Lit returns to Altadena this Halloween season with two three-play performances about things horrific, uncanny, or just plain scary. The short plays will be presented in probably the best place in town to do it: Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum.
But the venue creates a major challenge: how do you turn a graveyard into a theater?
According to Jeff G. Rack, it's difficult, but the location is worth it to create the Wicked Lit experience.
Rack, along with Jonathan Josephson and Paul Millet, are the three playwrights/producers/directors responsible for Wicked Lit. Rack also wears the hat of set designer, and he's the one who figures out how to create a theatrical experience in a place where the dead rest.
Wicked Lit held its first Halloween performance in 2009, at the reputedly-haunted Greystone Mansion in Los Angeles. "It was a great space, and we were looking at doing other shows there," Rack said, "but they were doing reconstruction and remodeling so it wasn't available to us last year."
The plots thicken
One of Wicked Lit's actor fans had performed in a show at Mountain View, a "walk through time" event sponsored by the Pasadena Museum of History where actors portrayed historical characters buried in the cemetery. Through that connection, they met Jay Brown, one of the owners of the cemetery.
"it was a nice match -- I mean, Jay was really excited about what we were doing," Rack said. "Jay's feeling and our feeling too is that he wanted to have people come to the space when they weren't in mourning and grieving, because it's a really beautiful mausoleum. I mean, the architecture and the history that's there and in the cemetery, it's something that he wanted people to see in a different way.
"Anyway it was a great match between us ... it's been a really nice partnership."
Brian David Pope and William Joseph Hill in The Cask of Amontillado, 2010. Photo by Daniel Kitayama.
The Wicked Lit performances aren't usually the kind where you take a seat and watch a play: the audience frequently gets up and walks to different locations for a total immersive experience. The space also dictates the writing of the plays.
Honoring the residents
"If we have the location already in mind ... we start staging it in the writing stage," Rack said. "Like 'Casting the Runes,' the original story, none of it takes place in a mausoleum, but there's a meeting point between these two men, and we're in a mausoleum, so I have to figure out how to get them to the mausoleum. It actually ended up as a great story point because one of the men's brothers had died ... and so they meet at his brother's crypt, and so it gives the meeting more weight.
"I actually changed the last name of the character to match the crypt that I was going to use. I mean, that gives you an idea of how much we allow the space to decide things for us. It just makes it that much more immersive -- wow, that IS Hinkle's crypt. It kind of honors the people who are (buried) here, too, that's the way I think of it -- they've been brought back to life for this production."
After the stories are written and casting finalized ("All of our actors come back, and they want to do the show every year so we've kind of grown this company of actors," Rack said), the rehearsals begin and the mausoleum and cemetery are transformed as lights, sound, and other equipment is deployed. For the cemetery, "It starts with a generator -- we have a very large generator out there ... we have to supply our own juice, that's how we do it. It's not a small operation." A tent is set up in the middle of the cemetery where all the plays can be monitored and sound, light, and effects are controlled.
If it rains, the cemetery scenes go on anyway. "Bad weather? There's no cancellation with Wicked Lit," Rack said. " Last year, the week of tech for our show 'The Unnameable' was in the rain -- we were basically teching and setting up in the rain."
Plugging away
As for the indoor scenes, "the biggest challenge within the mausoleum is that it's old, and so the electrical grid is not what you would say is current, no pun intended," Rack said. "There are a lot of plugs that are along the bottom base along the corridors, but 60 percent of them don't work, so we just have to find the ones that do."
Photo by Kyle Kleefeld.
This year, Wicked Lit will be running two separate productions: Production A is a reprise of last year's trio, Edger Allen Poe's "Cask of Amontillado," Charles Dickens' "The Chimes," and H.P. Lovecraft's "The Unnameable." Production B will be "A Ghost Story" by Mark Twain, "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James, and "The Body Snatcher" by Robert Lewis Stevenson.
Production A will start on Oct. 21, and Production B on Oct. 27. "Once Production B starts, it will be running concurrently," Rack said. That's six plays performed three times per night, with 180 audience members following their guides around the grounds from play to play, or scene to scene. It's a logistical puzzle, but Rack is confident it that it will work, creating a memorable evening of theater.
"Jonathan and Paul and I are really about the story, and the literature, and presenting thse stories ," Rack said. "I think what people are going to be surprised by is not just the fact that this is scary and this is spooky, that aspect of it ... but of the tender moments that are in there, and the character interaction and chemistry and bonding of the characters and the stuff that's underneath what's going on. It's not just a haunted house spook show, it's really about people and characters going through these situations."
For more information, showtimes, and tickets, go to wickedlit.org.
