Phantasmagoria IV: Hell Hath Risen
Phantasmagoria IV: Hell Hath Risen
Created by John DiDonna
Directed by John DiDonna, Kevin G Becker, Seth Kubersky and Alex Richmond
Choreographed by Mila Makarova and Dion Smith
Fight Direction by Bill Warriner
Staring Bill Warriner, Jeremy Wood, Stephen Lima and Samantha O’Hare
Empty Spaces Theatre Company
Presented at the Lowndes Shakespeare Center</em>
With that flock of credits, there was little room for actual Hell to rise in this year’s evolution of the Phantasmagoria cycle. If you’ve missed previous year’s shows catch this one, it’s a collection of horror stories, dance and puppetry that flows around the audience and sometimes sits in their laps. Tonight the Brothers Grimm (Wood and Warriner) go down to the Teutonic crossroads in 1817 to summon up the demons of storytelling. Its somewhere in Germany which is a neat trick since that country was 60 years in the future. They light off a piece of flash paper (that’s two flash paper shows in the building this season) and the demonic troupe arrives, led by the ring master (Stephen Lima) and his side kick Alice Liddell (O’Hare). Stories are told in a sort of group recital method, and grim puppets come out to dance between the shows. There’s a tension between the story collectors and the story tellers, the Grimm brothers claim they are preserving them, the specters claim they are destroying them and despoiling their truth. “Truth” is a rather slippery concept, and that premise goes down an alley of Lit theory even I am too timid to tackle. But I’ll say this: Phantasmagoria is the most theatrical horror story night you’ll see, and you don’t have to stand in line for 45 minutes to see it.
The stories are a mix of common and rare, we hear the “Myth of Pandora” and crowd favorite “The Cask Of Amontillado” resurfaces, on the rare side we discover Dickens “A Mad Man’s Manuscript” and the truly awful Grimm story “How the Children Played at Slaughtering.” I grew up in a Germanic atmosphere and I have some old children’s books that will curl your toes, my ancestors believed the way to keep children’s safe was to scare the poop out of them and this story does more than that. There are some aerial acts with Ms. Makarova climbing the silk scarf and her daughter Gina doing her ring routine, but the highlight of the evening was the final dragon slaying mega battle. There’s some serious puppetry here, and it’s worth the ticket.
For more information on Empty Spaces Theater Company, visit http://www.emptyspacestheatre.org
