For years now I’ve heard good things about Unbound Productions’ Wicked Lit, the annual site-responsive Halloween show that takes place at the Mountain View Mausoleum & Cemetery out in Alta Vista. In a way Wicked Lit has become a Halloween tradition: a theatrical performance for Spooky Season that a large swath of the family can experience together.
Wicked Lit isn’t for those looking for extreme horror thrills or haunted house jump scares. This is more or less all-ages Halloween fun that draws on a rich vein of spooky stories. As befits a company whose primary interest is the adaptation of literary works from the established canon into dramatic pieces, Wicked Lit is the equivalent of ghost stories told around a campfire.
This year that gets a touch literal, as the theme is the talent night at “Camp Mountain View.” A framing piece involves stories told around a (fake) campfire, as warm beverages are offered at the camp “snack shack.”
The basic format of Wicked Lit is unchanged from previous years, and mirrors what we saw earlier this year at History Lit. Three stories are adapted for the stage. This time out it’s H.P. Lovecrafts’ From Beyond, Ellen Glasgow’s The Shadowy Third, and Anansi and the Demons an adaption of traditional Ashanti proverbs and tales of Anansi the spider.
From Beyond, directed by the company’s Producing Artistic Director Jeff G. Rack, hits the paranoid tone of tone of Howard Philips Lovecraft perfectly. A winding trek through dark mausoleum hallways to reach multiple set-pieces crafts an appropriately creepy spell. There’s something inherently magical about walking though those halls at night — magical and transgressive. I couldn’t help but wonder what the permanent residents thought of all this, if perchance, they were aware of it at all.
If there is a problem with From Beyond, it is the one that plagues the whole of Wicked Lit. Everything is just a bit long, and moving from scene to scene with so many other audience members can become a bit of a chore. Part of it is the price of popularity, I suppose. But there’s something more at work, a pattern that I’m starting to see in general with the work these days. More on that in a moment.
First to Ellen Glasgow’s The Shadowy Third.
This was the piece that I was least familiar with — ironic given that the final piece is African folklore, but hey — I love folklore and mythology, and am not up on early 20th century authors.
The central twist of The Shadowy Third is visible from the first scene, if you’re familiar enough with the tropes in play. While the tale is nothing terribly surprising, environment is for those who haven’t been to the mausoleum before. Instead of plunging this part of the space into darkness, the lights are on and the space is ridiculously beautiful. A reminder that when we set our minds on it we can really do some wonderful things for our dead.
Director Bruce Gray’s staging uses the space smartly, and this is the piece that feels to moves fastest of the night. Perhaps that was my unfamiliarity with the story, or it could be the more contained staging. The acting feels of a piece with the setting and story, and that’s what you want out of a site-responsive literary adaptation.
My favorite piece of the night surprised me. It was Jonathan Josephson penned and Jaime Robledo directed Anansi adaptation. This one moved us across the street, away from the mausoleum grounds and into the cemetary itself. The first quarter of the piece had some masterful sound design that really brought the space to life. This was the closest to a sense of immersion I got all night long. I know that Wicked Lit’s thing isn’t really full-on immersion, but site-specific staging but nevertheless, I like what I like, and this was doing it for me.
The majority of the Anansi tale is told in a series of short scenes that include some clever puppetry work. If you know anything about the spider, you can see where the story is inevitably going, but the road there is quite fun. If you aren’t as familiar with the spider’s ways… well, you might be in for a treat indeed.
After each play the audience returns to camp to await the next rotation. There the company has set up some routines to keep people entertained while they wait. There’s also either a story or a pitch for support of the company that comes with each of these intermissions. The former is enjoyable, the later: a touch awkward, to be honest.
Here’s the thing: Wicked Lit is just too long by about a half an hour. I get that this is the company’s big production for the year, and that they’re out to give as much value to their supporters as possible. It’s just that there’s a point where the brain gets full.
It’s different when you’re running around unguided in a space and discovering things at your own pace. A processional, however, can only stay engaging for so long. There’s a temptation in the movement right now to provide an evening’s worth of entertainment. Yet so much of what makes the immersive and site-specific work truly unique is the air of the ephemeral. The sense that one got a fleeting glimpse of a world beyond what one already knew.
As it stands this year’s edition of Wicked Lit is absolutely solid work. I just wished they had left me wanting more, as opposed to making sure my goodie bag was absolutely full.
Wicked Lit 2016 runs through November 12th at the Mountain View Mausoleum & Cemetery in Altadena.
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