Since their first show at the 2016 Hollywood Fringe, Shine On Collective has been playing with audio as a driver of story.

In their latest piece, Echoes In the Dark — Echo 1: Inside My Soul, the writer/director team of Anna Mavromati and Marlee Delia take a step forward towards an aesthetic all their own while retelling the original gothic horror story: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

You begin Echo 1 by approaching a gray Honda Civic in a motel parking lot. There you find a man, Victor, sitting in the driver’s seat and wearing headphones. He hands you a pair of your own as you sit down and become a kind of reflection of the man behind the wheel.

As the story plays out between your ears and inside the car Victor’s voice slowly overwrites your own internal monologue. Larry Duncan — who provides Victor’s sonorous voice — works through a light pantomime of actions he/you once performed. The transference process is subtle, but by the time you’re sent out of the car it is complete.

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It is in one of the motel rooms where Elizabeth (Karlie Blair) awaits.

The headphones are stripped away from you in the room, and Elizabeth guides you through the memory, which takes on surrealist qualities as it unfolds. Here Mavromati’s writing and Delia’s direction play off each other to create an emotional distance that feels like a waking dream. Moments of agency and lucidity emerging from the inescapable march of fate.

Inside My Soul is a short show — taking as little as 17 minutes to unfold in its entirely — but what it lacks in length it makes up for in resonance. Delia and Mavromati’s skills as immersive storytellers have matured over the years, here they’ve settled into a groove that will be familiar to those who had the luck of catching their first intimate show Devoted but feels as fresh as the first time thanks to new narrative territory. Indeed, the return of certain techniques marks a kind of clarification of Shine On’s voice.

Indeed, it feels like Shine On is hitting their stride with this first chapter of Echoes in the Dark, which bodes well for the series as a whole.

Echoes in the Dark — Echo 1: Inside My Soul had a sold out run in September in LA’s South Bay region. A remount is planned. Interested parties should sign up for Shine On Collective’s email list.

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