A friend once told me my apartment was decorated for Halloween all the time. She was not wrong. All the decorations at our afterparty are usually in my bedroom. I’m not the creepy one of the Coil — that’s Jenny. (I’m just kidding Jenny. Please don’t hurt me.) I’m more… the spooky one. And so the Coil’s current project is uniquely suited to my particular aesthetic and thematic concerns. As they say on the internet: it’s relevant to my interests.
Horror and comedy are the two genres of theater in which the audience is encouraged to react vocally, visibly, and with enthusiasm. That is to say, if the folks on stage can hear you laugh or groan or gasp, we know we’ve done our jobs.
I hope that the three short plays that make up Strange Tales will all elicit vocal, but widely different reactions from the audience. Based on the reactions they’ve been getting from us in rehearsal, anyway, I think it’s likely.
The gasps will be at the end of Headaches (for my money our outright scariest piece). Maggie Brown is killing it as Kat.
Each time we’ve run Happy Anniversary, we’ve elicited a collective shudder from our director and Coil-mates. This one should make your skin crawl.
And if you don’t laugh your face off at Making Your Rage Work For You, I think you may be dead inside. Which is seasonally appropriate, but still sad for you.
It kills me, though, not to be able to tell you why all of these vignettes may get those reactions. All I can tell you is that we are headed for a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind… **
But I can show you these:
There’s a clue about each of our shows hidden in these covers from the classic 60s pulp horror anthology comic Strange Tales. There’s one cover here, of course, that doesn’t have a clue, because what’s a mystery without a red herring?
** Come to the show, identify this quote to me at the after-party, and I’ll give you a present.