Radiotheatre is Back

October is here. The air grows sharp and chill. Shadows lengthen as days shorten. You find yourself treading your usual paths, turning the street corners you’ve known as intimately as your own mind, but suddenly the blocks feel longer, emptier. Or, perhaps more alarming, you set out on your journey, letting your feet carry you as your mind wanders, trusting that the way is the same as it has ever been, but when you look up, you are facing The Kraine Theater and a hand is beckoning you inside.

Radiotheatre, now in its 11th season, has produced over 80 shows in NYC and on tour. This, the 7th installment in their annual Lovecraft festival, is a demonstration of craftual confidence and reverence. Each evening a different selection of stories from Lovecraft’s works are performed, with a little bit of background provided on each piece before the reading. I saw "The Curse of Yig," "Hypnos," and "The Horror at Red Hook," and will speak briefly to each of these pieces and then to the production as a whole.

"The Curse of Yig" is a spine tingling opener, with a framing device that sets the tone for the evening, but a script that ultimately is too ridiculous for modern horror listeners. With a heavily accented couple from Arkansas screaming “Yig!” again and again, any fear of the unknown is pounded away by clunky plotting and repetitious exposition. The original story, it should be noted, was only ghostwritten by Lovecraft, being the initial brainchild of Zealia Bishop. Lovecraft’s signature touch for macabre description is present in the script, and the moments in which the creature is described in detail are very effective. Sadly, a muddled ending that does not seem to follow from the setup, and that therefore does not infect us, limits this story to a tone-setter at best.



 "Hypnos," the second piece in our evening, is a lesser known short by the author, but hits all the hallmarks of a Lovecraftian short: dreams, artists, insanity, and contact with the incomprehensible. A sculptor and her mysterious friend transcend time and space by the use of a certain set of drugs. Over time they discover they are no longer aging, but as they travel deeper and deeper into this dreamscape, the pair push too far, and encroach upon forbidden knowledge. A strong piece, originally written as a first person recollection, "Hypnos" has a creeping sense of hopelessness and growing despair, and this solitude works on your nerves until the last twist of the sculptor’s knife.

The evening closed with a story that is very difficult to adapt. Lovecraft himself said about "The Horror at Red Hook" that it was long and rambling. The text itself is saturated with religious and superstitious reference, and Radiotheatre has done a good job adapting it, by dispensing with the dense language and focusing on the detective’s madness as he guides himself through the story via conversation with a disembodied voice. Though it deals with the investigation into a cult in Brooklyn, it lacks some of that eldritch ingredient that makes his other works so engaging. Lovecraft, Radiotheatre explains before the performance, hated New York. While this shows, and is somewhat disappointing for those of us who enjoy the city, it is actually the ingrained xenophobia of the narrator that is uncomfortable to sit with; one is never sure whether it is the character or the author shoehorning in these repeated references to "dark skinned immigrants." The payoff is fine, but if you can’t ignore the racist elephant in the room, you will have a hard time engaging with this story in any iteration.

What Radiotheatre does, in terms of production, is clever and simple. The lights are loosely designed, but free to creepily flicker at any time, or rather, constantly. The performers are cleanly amplified and the ambient noise is wonderfully designed. The scripts are all sound, and aware of the Lovecraft aesthetic without ever pandering to it. It is a shame, however, that the cast size is so small, and that two of these three pieces were read by a solo performers. While this must make for a streamlined production process, it comes across as unambitious. The form of live radio theatre brings to mind demonstrations of great vocal acting, with multiple voices and characters for each actor, and a sense of play between the audio effects and the actors to create as much of a detailed world as possible. There are very few specific sound effects in this production, and perhaps most disappointingly, no use of foley. All the sounds are prerecorded and run by a man sitting on the stage with a laptop.  With so few tenets of radio theatre remaining, but with performances that are quite well informed and always fitted to the text, it might be both cruel and accurate to refer to the evening as a series of designed readings, rather than a night of theatre.

This blog post appeared here first:  http://newyorktheatrereview.blogspot.com