Is it possible to engender genuine horror in an audience through a live stage experience?
That’s the question I started pondering a decade or so ago. Now don’t knee-jerk back some glib response. Think before you answer, and be honest. I have given a lot of thought to this, and I am still not completely sure. So this Halloween season I thought I would crack open the question again for churning with a series of scripts, excerpts and essays, in hopes that together we might strike some undiscovered insights.
Let me kick it off with “Often Lie”, a very short play I wrote for the late-night horror series Psychopomp Presents. . ., which was produced by Paul Morgan Stetler and myself, and directed by Braden Abraham, at Capitol Hill Arts Center in October 2005 . We billed the show thusly:
A late night modicum of mayhem featuring world premiere plays penned to plumb the very depths of the collective unconscious. “Lil’ Heroes” “Often Lie” and “The Reckoning” are works by three of Seattle’s most innovative playwrights: Louis Broome, Paul Mullin and Stephanie Timm. Come on, give your dark side a joy ride!
It was a failure. But one of the very best kind, a true experiment wherein a hypothesis was advanced, a test was run, and data was extracted. Our data read something like: “You cannot scare drunk hipsters after 11 pm no matter how hard you try.”
The idea for my contribution “Often Lie” was essentially, “What if two random people met and discovered they were having each other’s dreams?” From here I began lightly building in my favorite freest fashion, by just randomly associating and seeing where it takes me. I thought of Queen Mab and went back to read Mercutio’s famous rant. Spiders seemed to be prominent in that speech, so I let that take me further on. I leave it to you to find the connections, such as they are. I soon decided that only one of the characters should be dreaming the other’s dream, thus leaving more opportunity to explore the “who’s dreaming who?” question. I landed on a sort of Donald-Rumsfeld-meets-Queen-Mab scenario which pleased me. I think, given the right circumstances, it might possibly frighten an audience that wasn’t simply looking to laugh and get drunker before getting laid.
For its world premiere, I was blessed to have the dream casting of Michael Patten as “Drum” and Stephanie Shine as “Mabel”.
Here’s the play: