The frightfest's Altadena director and his actors look for the skull beneath the skin
by Timothy Rutt
For a group of people whose job it is to frighten the living daylights out of you, the people behind Wicked Lit are scarily .... nice. Normal. And likable.
Wicked Lit, of course, is the annual Halloween season treat of spooky tales from Unbound Productions and performed at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum. Now in its fifth year (fourth year in Altadena), this year’s production looks at three classic tales of terror: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear”’ and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The New Catacomb.”
We had a chance to talk to “New Catacomb” director Doug Clayton and his actors during a break in rehearsal last week, and found that one of the notable aspects of Wicked Lit is that the performers never quite want to leave it.
Feels like home
Katie Pelensky (Mary) is here for her fourth year. “These are the best people I’ve gotten to work with,” she said. “The first day of orientation, when we arrive at the mausoleum, I’m so happy to be here. I love the building. It feels like home. People say, it’s really weird, Katie, but it’s not that weird, it makes sense. The building has a really positive energy about it, It seems like whoever’s been laid to rest here, has been done with love. It’s a really positive space.
“I’ve had some really wonderful experiences here with both cast and crew. We’re a family. I came into the show last year after going through a really really rough time, and it was like I was just surrounded by love the moment I came in.
“A lot of us stay in touch year-round, too. This is one of very few theater opportunities that I’ve had where a good number of us have stayed in touch afterwards.”
Fire burn and cauldron bubble, i.e.: fondue
Chairman Barnes (Burger), another Wicked Lit veteran, agrees: “A lot of shows you do, you come together and you’re a family for that show, and then you all go your separate ways and you stay friends and your paths may cross again ...This is the only theatrical experience I’ve had where the people actually get together for game night once a month...”
”... which is awesome,” Pelensky interjects.
Barnes: “Whoever’s not busy gets together and we play games and have fondue.”
Pelensky: “And we support each other, and we go see shows together that that none of us are in, and we go see each other’s shows. This guy [Barnes] and a few other people came to see a show that I was in on my birthday, and sang Happy Birthday to me during the curtain call -- I mean, normal friends don’t really do that!”
Local direction
Clayton -- who may be the director, but who is tall and dashing as any leading man -- was brought on for the first time last year by Wicked Lit’s founders and producers Jonathan Josephson, Paul Millet, and Jeff G. Rack. At first, he wasn’t quite sure he could do it.
“I’ve been a theater director for a long time, but over the past couple of years it’s been challenging for me to direct full shows because my wife’s getting her doctorate, I have a two year old, a full-time job, and lots of things going on,” Clayton said. “But the producers wanted to bring on a director last year and they called me and said, hey, we want you to direct. It’s Wicked Lit, so you’ll only be directing one-third of a show, and it’s at the mausoleum.
“Oh, you mean the one two blocks from my house?” said Clayton, who lives on Marengo Avenue. “I think I can do that.
“It’s worked out very well for me and very well for them, because after rehearsal, we have to lock up, and so they’ve had production meetings in the grass -- but now they can come to my house, we can have coffee, have a fire,” Clayton said. If he wanted to, he said, “I could lie on the street and roll down [to work].”
All the world’s a stage
One of the gifts and challenges for the crew is the performing space -- which is, after all, a mausoleum and cemetery. Actors are bumping elbows with the audience, and with three different plays going on simultaneously, it is a challenging show to mount. In the case of “The New Catacomb,” Clayton said, “We’re not in one room -- we’re in five different locations, and we have to stage each one differently ... in this piece, where the audience is moving a lot, [the challenge] is how to move 30 people quickly and safely.”
The proximity to the audience is good though, Barnes said; “I think it actually helps quite a bit because when you’re in a proscenium stage situation, there’s a lot of distance between you and the audience, you have to sell the space that you’ll be inhabiting -- but here you don’t have to work as hard, you’re in it with them they’re in it with you. It’s a shared experience that I think is the great magic of Wicked Lit. The audience doesn’t have to work hard to suspend their disbelief.”
Clayton agrees: “Most of these characters who are in these shows don’t know they’re in a horror story -- it’s their life. In our play, these two guys don’t know something is going to happen. ... they’re just trying to get through the day.”
The talking dead
Not that it doesn’t present interesting challenges. Barnes: “There’s a real element of unpredictability, because the audience is in your playing space. That barrier that is normally there is completely obliterated, and so you get things like people coming up and asking characters for directions -- as happened last year, didn’t it, Katie?”
Pelensky laughs: “Yes it did, yes it did .. it was at the end, where I’m just praying and looking into the light and holding my almost-dead child and a man approached me -- and I just kept praying... He was literally just like in front of me, and one of the other cast members, who was dead at that point, just leaped up and said, ‘Can we help you? We tried to hold it until the rest of the audience left so only one saw us break character.”
But scares are what people are there for. Pelensky said, “I’ve had people ask me ... is it a haunted house experience, and it’s not, ‘cause it’s not just where can we scare them, where can we pop out. The storytelling element of it comes first, that’s what the priority is. That’s why it’s Wicked Lit, that’s why we do these adaptations of stories.”
Classic tales
First time Wicked Lit actor Carlos Larkin (Kennedy) agrees. “The emotions are there on the page, that’s why these things are classics. I mean, ‘Dexter’ ends this week, but Edgar Allen Poe keeps going, and there’s a reason for that -- because he is truly a creepy writer ... I think human beings are naturally voyeuristic. When you can see someone about to have a horrible death right in front of you -- I mean how often can you have that opportunity with no danger to oneself? That’s what Wicked Lit is all about.”
Putting on a show at Mountain View is a positive for Altadena resident Clayton. “We don’t have a theater, so it’s great to do something that’s in the neighborhood and a great theatrical experience without going to Pasadena,” he said. The staff and owners are “happy to have us here, happy to have us bringing people here, for having the mausoleum and cemetery to be more engaged with the community.”
Larkin laughs, intoning in a Boris Karloff voice: “You could almost say we bring some life to the place.”
Wicked Lit runs from Oct. 4-Nov. 2 at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum, 2300 N. Marengo Avenue. Performances are Friday-Sunday, Oct 4-6; Thursday-Sunday, Oct 10-13; Thursday-Sunday, Oct 17-20; Thursday-Sunday, Oct 24-27; Wednesday-Saturday, Oct 30-Nov 2. All performances will begin promptly at 7:30 PM, but show up after the gate opens at 7 to enjoy “The Masque of the Red Death” experience that frames the shows. Tickets range from $30-60. For more information go to wickedlit.org or call (323) 332-2065.
