This week it's all scary stuff: death, madness, and most horrid of all: POLITICS. We dive into the mind of a dead man in L.A., have high tea in a world imagined by Shirley Jackson, and be a fly on the wall at a forgotten turning point in American history.
Let's get to it!
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Convention (Los Angeles)
$44-100, Hollywood, Oct. 3 - Nov. 3, 2026
With nearly 50 actors playing everything from future President Harry Truman to the goons who make up the Mayor of Chicago’s muscle, Convention — written and directed by Danny Rocco — is certainly one of the more ambitious productions of the past few years to be developed here in Los Angeles.
Essentially a historical recreation of the 1944 Democratic National Convention that saw sitting Vice President and progressive darling Henry A. Wallace thrown over for the Senator from Missouri just weeks after D-Day, the production looks to recreate the chaos of the event by putting the audience in the middle of the action, albeit in condensed form.
And therein lies the rub, as cramming the action of multiple days involving a couple thousand people into a single room where the ratio of audience to performers is something like two to one certainly creates chaos, but it struggles to create legibility at key points. This is especially true early on during a sequence involving the conspirators who are set to maneuver Truman to the VP nomination, with an eye towards the Presidency as an ailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt is known to all to be on borrowed time.
The production often works against itself, prioritizing cacophony over clarity in a quest for verisimilitude. Aside from improv with the many, many, many actors it doesn’t really seek to deliver on anything like audience agency — interaction is limited to reading pre-scripted bits or marking meaningless ballots as the outcome is set to follow history — and undercuts the skills of the cast as both actors and interactors more often than not over a two and half hour runtime. (Note: there is a $100 "Candidate" ticket, and that may be a wildly different experience. If one was present the night I went, it wasn't obvious to a punter in the back row.)
It’s an often frustrating experience precisely because there is an interesting idea here along with good performances and strong writing in key sequences. What it lacks is a sense of how to orchestrate these elements into a whole that alternates between evoking fracture and providing the audience with something more than just a rough gestalt. We are flies on the wall, but afforded none of the freedom that flies have to seek out the good stuff.
A larger space would remedy this, to a great degree if the large scale cast is maintained in future iterations. Alternatively something less literal could bring the convention chaos fever dream to life with a smaller cast and a greater emphasis on managing the audience’s attention. As it stands the chaos feels like clutter much of the time, and I found myself checking out of those moments. Quite the opposite of feeling like I was bearing witness to something historic.
That said, over the course of the play it becomes clear that the production could deliver on that clarity and managing of focus, but is making an active choice not to. Hence the frustration when there’s so many good elements in the stewpot.
– Noah J. Nelson, Publisher
Morwood Manor (Denver)
devised by an ensemble of Denver actors with co-direction from Soleil Kohl and Hang Nguyen
From $35; Merritt Wellness; Oct. 15 - 18
It is no easy task to tell a story about descending into insanity in a way that is funny, but that’s exactly what co-directors Soleil Kohl and Hang Nguyen accomplished with their sold-out, limited run of Morwood Manor October 15-18 inside an old church-turned-yoga studio.
The show, devised by the six-person cast and inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, casts the audience as guests at a tea party in the Morwood’s castle. It begins simply enough, with the Morwood sisters serving tea and cookies, interacting with guests as they arrive. But things slowly escalate into chaos as the family progresses through a series of bizarre customs, rituals and generally disturbing behavior.
Many of those rituals elicit a special kind of humor—one that comes not from cheap jokes or cheesy one-liners, but from a place of tension and unease. What I mean by that is, when something exceptionally weird happens in this show (like the butler testing the tea for poison by sucking on Lily Morwood’s finger that she used to stir her tea with) it goes on and on, stretching to a point of madness where all you can do is laugh at the absurdity and commitment.
Compared to Kohl’s other works I’ve detailed on No Proscenium (Denver Fringe 2026’s Don’t Kill Daisy and 2025’s Blah Blah Blah) Morwood Manor is a lot closer to a standard proscenium show. The open world-style serving of tea and cookies–which took place during guest arrival and later in the show as a sort of faux intermission–was really the only interactive portion of the night.
But immersive doesn’t always have to mean interactive. It can also mean “fully enveloping,” which the in-the-round format of the seated dining room was. But what really took me by surprise was the way that the room transitioned as the sun set outside. When the 5 o'clock show began, bright sunlight illuminated the stained glass windows presiding over the party and lit the room in a warm glow. But as the evening wore on that light faded, and as the madness of the Morwood family ensued, darkness literally swallowed the room… and then stayed that way, lit only by flickering candles and handheld flashlights spotlighting the actors.
Absolutely perfect for the Halloween season, Morwood Manor was a beautiful juxtaposition of horror and comedy that was both deeply unsettling and awkwardly hilarious. And it’s a damn shame it only ran for one weekend.
– Danielle Riha, Denver Curator
Post-Mortem (Los Angeles)
Ultra Dark Society and Into Ruin
$90, East Los Angeles, Oct. 16-18
What’s left of an extreme haunt when you strip away the shocks and the takedowns?
In the case of Post-Mortem, a collaboration of two extreme haunt studios who offered up non-extreme editions of the show during their brief run over the weekend, the answer is: a lot.
The brisk 35-60 minute experience — it can vary based on number of participants and how much participants interact with the actors and take to solve challenges — is still exceptionally kinetic. I found myself crawling through greasy fake tundra, under faux barbed wire in loam, and through a sandy tunnel. (I’ll note I was given the option to not crawl through the last one).
The extended tummy time was just the means of transport through a series of flashbacks as I investigated what looks to be a cult murder through the use of a setup that’s equal parts Flatliners and Assasin’s Creed. The project’s safe word was Anima, which felt like an easter egg for AC’s Animus past lives regression machine. Only here we’re diving into the life of the recently gruesomely murdered Phillip.
Turns out Philip is a real piece of work — a fortune hunter who’s willing to sacrifice anyone and everyone is his quest for a mystical artifact that holds some untold power. That story gives the combined Ultra Dark Society and Intro Ruin teams a big canvas to play with, which is how I found myself in a shootout on the tundra, held hostage in a paranoid American camp in Vietnam, and the ruins of an ancient oracle in Greece at each point dealing with those whose lives Philip shattered on his quest. Odds heavy that I’m next on that list.
To be sure the sets were often more evocative that photoreal, but very effective set design and a cast that kept the center of attention on what was happening in the room created a one-two punch that gave the scenes a heightened, cinematic reality. In each sequence the probable source of the “extreme” dimension was either clear or obvious in hindsight: a pool at the Oracle that bore signs of people having their heads dunked in, an electrical device used to menace my toes in the jungle, airsoft guns that were unloaded for me but which would have full clips otherwise. (Not to worry, we wore protection anyway.)
It was nice to know what kinds of things I was missing, and to be able to confirm that such things are not for me all while throughly enjoying the story that was on offer.
There’s a dedicated, passionate fanbase of extreme haunts in the U.S. and Europe, with studios that are doing some fascinating work that really isn’t for everyone. By structuring out a non-extreme version of Post-Mortem, Ultra Dark Society and Into Ruin are giving themselves space to prove their storytelling chops and still create intense experiences without the Fear Factor edge.
I hope they take that option again in future work.
– Noah J. Nelson, Publisher
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