Mental Worx Theatre Company brings The Woman In Black to the Empire stage not long after ETC's Blithe Spirit and as we're looking forward to GGFCT's The Haunting of Hill House.
There seems to be something in the air...
There are often trends in theatrical productions; certain shows will make the rounds, getting produced by a number of theaters across the region within a short span of time. I saw both casts of Carrie: The Musical at Bismarck's Dakota Stage somewhere around the beginning of October 2022, only to see the show pop up in November at UND's Burtness Theatre (a third excellent cast!). Empty State Theatre and the Burtness both took on Ride the Cyclone within a few months of each other.
And while the shows themselves may be different, Grand Forks' theater scene seems to be currently obsessed with ghosts!
ETC's 13th season is themed around the supernatural. Their electrifying run of The Thin Place was genuinely scary and superbly acted; I didn't end up doing a post about it, but I still think about that haunting ending to this day! And I'll watch Hannah Diers in anything! She was one of the few bright spots in a rather mediocre production of Young Frankenstein to open the season that I also didn't do a post about, but that was more of a "If you don't have anything nice to say..." kind of situation.
The last production on ETC's mainstage (I'm devastated that I missed seeing She Kills Monsters in the black box, but the tickets were selling too fast and it's my own fault for procrastinating!) was Blithe Spirit. I'm a huge Noel Coward fan, and this production was pretty solid. The costumes by Mare Thompson were impeccably tailored, except for one notable exception - I have a lot of thoughts on the casting and portrayal of Madame Arcati that may still get their own post, but let me shorthand it by saying that I think the old standby sight gag of "Ha. Ha. Brick of a man in a dress" is tired and played out, and while the actor made a few interesting choices to elevate it beyond the outdated antics of Milton Berle, this doesn't feel like the moment in our culture to be playing fast and loose with how we introduce queerness and gender non-conformity, whether intentional or not, into our productions.
Oooh, she's extra salty today!
But back to the topic: ghosts. Coward's show is a farce, much lighter than the other shows being produced this season, but we seem to have ghosts on the brain.
Right now, Mental Worx is bringing The Woman In Black to the stage at the Empire, a historic location with its own rumored apparitions, a perfect venue for this classic ghost story. The play is based on the novel by Susan Hill, and I was surprised while researching to see that it was published in 1983 as the story has the feel of a classic horror story much older, a volume that would have rubbed elbows with Agatha Christie's later mysteries.
J. Paul Zimmerman, who has been popping up in a number of local productions the last few years, steps off the stage to direct Isaac Engels and Kelly Clow in this tight, spooky production. If you haven't seen it, it involves a man named Kipps (Clow, to start) who hires a dramatist (Engels) to help him stage the story of his time at Eel Marsh House, settling the affairs of the recently deceased Alice Drablow. As they work on the staging, the actor becomes Kipps in a re-enactment of his time there, his search for the mystery of Eel Marsh House, and his encounters with the Woman in Black. Clow, as the elder Kipps, plays the ancillary characters that the younger Kipps meets during his stay. It's all very meta, very play-within-a-play, and I promise it's much easier to follow than my tortured description makes it sound.
The actors are well suited to their roles. Engels creates a jovial enough Kipps, a bit bright and a little frivolous, which gives the show some light moments in the middle of Eel Marsh House's gloomy interiors, and the contrast when he starts to succumb to the dark allure of the manse is palpable. Clow does a fine job of creating unique moments for each of the side characters, adjusting mannerisms and accents to ensure that we see the transition as the younger Kipps moves from office to train station to country home, and then emerges again as the older Kipps trying his best to relive his traumatic memories in the staged theatrical exercise. The changes were fluid and effortless, though there were times where it seemed that he was relying on the "prop" script a bit more than necessary to pull off this particular device.
As a technical theatre nerd, I think the production mostly succeeds. The costumes are fine if unremarkable, and everyone seems to look as if they come from the same world. The bare bones staging mostly works; this kind of show has so much potential for grander set pieces, but that's the nature of working in shared spaces, and sadly is becoming a "new normal." The cast do well with their movable props and furnishings (though there is a large box that occasionally gets drug across the stage, making the most horrendous, grating racket!), and some of the gimmicks they do with different props are executed very well.
The real standout for me was the lighting design. They created some really fantastic effects with just a few overhead spots, a couple of follow spots, and the lighted backdrop. The only criticism I had is that there are two moments early in the show where the woman in black appears (the scene is set during the day in the graveyard) where they hit her with a spotlight that feels incongruous against the soft, tawny daylight effect on the rear scrim. Having her lurk into the scene, be noticed by Kipps and the audience, and then slowly recede into the wings would have been much more effective. But it's a minor quibble, and I forgave it easily when they revealed a particularly simple but effective lighting gimmick when Kipps is turning on lights throughout Eel Marsh House. It's so simple, but it works perfectly. Not only is it a clever use of light, but it helps bring the vast space of the mansion into the enclosed space of the Empire stage.
So why are we suddenly so taken with ghosts?
Maybe there is something about a ghost story that acts as an antidote to the pull of nostalgia. When some around us drone the chant to "Make America great again," ghosts stories remind us that the past is not always what we think it is; it can be a dark place filled with remembered traumas and the residue of our darkest moments. They represent the things we can't let go of, the things we can't heal from.
Death is the ultimate mystery, and ghost stories make us question what an afterlife might look like, and what remains here after we're gone.
There are three performances of The Woman In Black remaining: a matinee on Sunday, March 9, and evening showings on Friday and Saturday, March 14th and 15th. I highly recommend you try to catch this show before it closes, especially if you are like me and you appreciate the spooky ooky all year long, not just at Halloween!
And be on the lookout for The Haunting of Hill House to come a little later this spring to the Fire Hall Theatre, directed by Gina Uhlir. The original movie is one of my favorite ghost story films (you can see the whole list in my video below!) and I can't wait to see how it translates to the stage. There is some great queer subtext in the film and I'm excited to see whether or not that comes through in the stage production as well.
And maybe that's why I'm so keen to talk about ghost stories right now: we're living in a moment where those on the right are trying harder than they ever have before to erase the sins of the past. Ghost stories are the history that we refuse to talk about, the wrongs we refuse to acknowledge. As a queer person who came out in the mid-90s, I saw how the specter of the AIDS epidemic still hung like a fog over my community.
When I came out, there were so many fewer protections for LGBTQ+ people, stories of people being abandoned by their families after coming out were much more common, and more high profile hate crimes. And things were better then than they had been in earlier decades. All of that history, all of that pain, deserves to be acknowledged, and yet we are on a path backward, erasing so many of these hard-fought protections.
Humans seem unable (or unwilling) to learn from the evils of history. And the haunting continues...
Comments