I recently attended a performance of Play Dead at the Greenwich Village off-Broadway theater, The Players Theatre. While I was on stage the dead spoke to me and I had my entrails pulled out.
Teller and Todd Robbins invite Death out to play in PLAY DEAD, a new spirit-shaking Off-Broadway show inspired by “Midnight Spook Shows,” an American institution from the 1930s to the 1970s. As the guide for the evening, Robbins draws audiences into an unknown haunted world full of frightful surprises and diabolical laughter. Although very much a theatrical work, it is hardly a typical “play,” but rather a dramatic, unnerving thriller – here and now in an “abandoned" theater, illuminated by a single ghostlight – in which audiences test their nerves and face their fears as they are surrounded by ethereal sights, sounds and even touches of the returning dead – all achieved by wry, suspenseful storytelling and uncanny stage illusions.
From The New York Times' review:
When you see a good show, you like to come away with a keepsake: the ticket stub, the program, perhaps a T-shirt purchased in the lobby. The people behind “Play Dead” apparently know this, because they make every effort to send you home with a fellow audience member’s entrails stuck in your hair....
(Image from Richard Kornberg & Associates. That's not me on the left, but let's just say that I know how he feels. So does Robbins.)
Comments