The stage is alive ... It's alive!
Not so long ago, a scary evening at the theater meant “Dracula” or “Frankenstein.”
No offense to those old thrillers, but it’s 2017. There’s a whole new generation of things out there to scare the bejeezus out of us, everything from lunatic dictators with atomic weaponry to robots with out-of-control artificial intelligence. Or zombies, the source of so many modern-day nightmares.
Over at Know Theatre of Cincinnati, they’ve come up with a double bill of new scary plays to usher in the Halloween season. Actually, one of the shows is a trilogy, so technically, this is a quadruple bill. The productions run in tandem from Oct. 20 to Nov. 4.
Despite its title, “13 Dead Dreams of Eugene,” created by Erika Kate MacDonald and Paul Strickland, it's not really a show about nightmares, says Strickland.
But what exactly are “dead dreams?” And who, for that matter, is Eugene?
It turns out that the play is based on a painfully real story. “Eugene” is the name that was bestowed on a man whose body was found alongside a road in Sabina, Ohio, in 1929. He was never identified. And no one ever claimed his body. But over the course of the next 35 years, thousands of people would come and view his embalmed corpse, which remained on display until he was buried in 1964.
“Creepy, huh?” says MacDonald.
They came across the tale of Eugene back in 2015, during a drive from Columbus to Cincinnati.
“I was in a very bad mood,” recalls Strickland. Since he’s an aficionado of what most of us would regard as tacky roadside attractions, he’d planned to make a stop at a pawn shop he’d read about. “They set up taxidermy chickens playing poker.”
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But when they called, they were told it was closed for the season.
“So I secretly started looking for something to put Paul in a better mood,” says MacDonald. “I came across this entry at RoadsideAmerica.com about ‘The Sabina Mummy.’ I read it to Paul and he definitely got in a better mood.”
The couple regularly takes their one- and two-person shows on the road, performing in small theaters and Fringe festivals all over North America. They’d always wanted to perform at the Twin Cities Horror Festival, but hadn't found the right material yet.
“Eugene” looked like the solution. The show premiered in Minneapolis last year. And now, after many revisions, it’s ready to reappear here as one of the first productions of the couple’s production company, Theatre Mobile.
The trilogy, "A Zombie Odyssey," is the creation of Ricky Coates, the writer/performer whose show “Tesla ex Machina” was one of the hits of the 2016 Cincinnati Fringe Festival.
“We definitely pack a lot into these shows,” says Coates, speaking by phone from his Salt Lake City home. “What a television program would take three seasons to do, I do in three hours.”
A few years ago, he was working regularly as a visiting artist in schools.
“I found that, with a lot of junior and high school kids, their monsters were zombies and robots,” says Coates. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized that those are our modern monsters. That’s what we’re afraid of, of becoming soulless consumers in a consumer society.”
Before long, a play was starting to take shape. It was about a newly dead – and then undead – guy named Brian searching to reunite with his wife. But along the way, the undead Brian discovers a level of humanity in himself that he didn’t have when he was alive.
“After I wrote it and performed it, I realized that there was more of a story that I wanted to tell, so I started building from there,” says Coates.
The final piece of the trilogy – called “Daughter of the Dead” – is having its premiere here in Cincinnati. The first two plays are one-person plays. But for this third one, Coates has recruited actor Sadie Bowman, who was a mainstay of many earlier Cincinnati Fringe Festivals.
“The reason I decided to do this in three parts doesn’t really have to do with the shape of the story,” says Coates. “Blood, gore, sex, violence – physically, I cannot do that for three hours.”
It’s a funny line. And true. But Coates realizes how abrasive that might sound to some people. So he continues.
“What I like to say is that this is ‘good horror’,” he says. “What I mean by that is that it’s smart horror. It is a monster story. But it’s using the vehicles of monsters and horror in order to question certain aspects of our society. There’s a lot of philosophy sprinkled into these shows. And,” he adds, ”I think it’s very funny.”
And for those traditionalists whose Halloween wouldn’t be complete with seeing “Dracula,” it turns out that there is a very good production on stage now at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. The production is handsome, harrowing and wonderfully erotic. It’s proven so popular – deservedly, in my opinion – that CSC has already added a 2 p.m. show on Oct. 21. For “Dracula” information, call 513-381-2273 or go to www.cincyshakes.com.
IF YOU GO
What: “13 Dead Dreams of Eugene” and “A Zombie Odyssey”
When: Oct. 20-Nov. 4
Where: Know Theatre of Cincinnati, 1120 Jackson St., Over-the-Rhine
Tickets: $15
Information: 513-300-5669; knowtheatre.com
NOTE: The three shows of “A Zombie Odyssey” are ticketed separately