Update October 26: I've added reviews of the shows I saw yesterday, bringing my total up to six. All of them are great, so either I chose well, or it's a strong year at TCHF. You still have a few more days to catch some great shows!
This is one of two shows presented in The Crane Theater's small black box theater studio, and will continue through October 20 before giving way to the other studio show. The intimate space leads to a more visceral and intense feeling of terror and unease, which this show uses well. Audience is seated on two sides of the room, the other two walls are covered with drawings of whales, symbols, and text - English and otherwise. We're on an island somewhere in the Pacific, in this tiny room where a whaler who was found floating on the sea is being held. Played by writer Duck Washington, he's there when we enter the space and is obviously distressed. Soon he's visited by a missionary and his wife who are looking after him, as well as a mysterious man who's very interested in his ship. We soon learn his story, and it's horrifying, involving storms, a deranged captain, a magic book, and demons that live in the sea. Directed by Jenny Moeller, the show has that creepy feeling that something is not right, a feeling that intensifies throughout the show, with help from the sound and lighting design (storms!) and excellent performances by the five-person cast (also including Philip D. Henry, Tyler Stamm, Becky Hauser, and Maureen L. Bourgeois) who are uncomfortably close to us.
The people who started TCHF are consistently great; as their name implies, they often do comedy, but for this festival it's a deliciously dark brand of comedy. The Terms is set in a NYC insurance company in 1929, just before the crash, with a couple of "hell of a salesman" guys who will sell a policy to anyone and everyone, dead or alive. But it turns out this is not just an ordinary insurance company scam, they are feeding money (and occasionally bodies) to the demons that live in the building, aka "The Board." The Four Humors (Allison Vincent as a ruthlessly ambitious salesman, Brant Miller as the boss, Matt Spring as the best salesman and he knows it, and Ryan Lear as a timid and poor salesman) are joined by Corie Casper as the naive young salesman, and they're all both hilarious and terrifying. The lighting effects, especially for the demons, are so wildly effective I had to close my eyes at times, and projections of old timey scenes give us that vintage feel, as do the '20s era "Brooks Brothers" suits, with a set including a vintage desk, file cabinets, and blood. As always with Four Humors, the show is so consistent and detailed and polished, which may be why their opening performance was sold out. And the plot twist near the end made this show scary in a very timely and relevant way. Their next show is on Thursday, through next Tuesday, and you may want to get tickets soon.
This is a good old-fashioned ghost story, brilliantly written and performed by Derek Lee Miller. The entire show takes place in a police interrogation room in Pike County, Illinois - where Derek is actually from, and from which he takes inspiration for the stories. He plays a fourth generation drug smuggler, from the days of prohibition through the acid craze to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado but not neighboring states, creating opportunity for families like this. We hear stories of his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father - whom the police are currently looking for. He refuses to give any incriminating evidence, until the power is knocked out by the loudest thunder clap I've ever heard in a theater, that you can feel in your bones. Because this is TCHF, the stories aren't just about drug smuggling, but contain elements of demons (a consistent theme of my day at TCHF), mysterious escapes, and other supernatural phenomenon. With a healthy dose of family drama and trauma thrown in. Derek embodies all of the characters in the stories, each one of which would be effective at a campfire, and together form a collective of great scary storytelling. Performances continue through Monday October 27.
Updated October 26:
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Written and directed by Strike Theater's Mike Fotis, you may think this is a comedy, and while it is terribly funny at times, the creepy live underscoring quickly alerts us to the drama and terror of the story. It's 1980 in a small town, and a couple of exes (Peytie McCandless and Jay Kistler) stop at a bank so that she can withdraw money from her longtime criminal father's account to ransom his freedom from a gang. What could go wrong? When they run into recently promoted bank manager and her recently (forcibly) retired sheriff husband (Rita Boersma and Sam Landman, whose bickering long married couple I would happily watch for an entire show), and the new sheriff with something to prove (Mike Fotis), it turns into the shootout at the O.K. Corral Bank. And here's where things get interesting, and where the unique talent in physical storytelling of Improv Movement Company (IMP) comes into play. As each character is dying, they flash back to a recent memory that gives more color to their character, so that we feel their death more deeply as the IMP troupe drags them into the great unknown. The use of an overhead projector and white sheets used as screens or set pieces give the show an old timey theater magic feel. It's a fantastically executed concept that tells a story of too many guns (even imaginary) resulting in too many deaths, and what happens after.
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In this pet project (pardon the pun) of Nissa Nordland (Artistic Director of TCHF), she pays tribute to her dearly departed cat Delilah through the story of 16-year-old Rosemary whose best friend is the grandma who is raising her and her 17-year-old cat Zelda. She's super into witchy stuff, as is grandma, but Rosemary prefers to learn about the occult from TikTok. It's obvious where this story is going, which doesn't make Zelda's death any less tragic (I recently lost my 17-year-old sweet kitty Claude Hooper Bukowski, so I felt it!). But Rosemary is not ready to let Zelda go, so she casts a couple of spells to bring her back, inadvertently opening a portal to another (scary) world, beyond her skills as a "baby witch." A clever and perfectly choreographed incorporation of video (the TikTok-ers, played by Sam Landman, Jonathan Feld, and Nissa herself) and audio recording, and a live cast (Tarra Lucchino manipulating the Zelda puppet and playing other characters, along with Katherine Kupiecki and Nicole Laurenne) help tell the story in an effective and affecting way. Grief is real, even (or sometimes more so, in my experience) when it's a pet, but Rosemary's story shows us there's an even greater cost to not letting go, as hard as that is.
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As my friend Kendra from Artfully Engaging noted, the scariest thing at this year's TCHF might be the montage of actual vintage footage of various evangelist propaganda and children's religious programming playing on a TV screen before this show, which is a scary gory spoof of such things (created and directed by Kyle B. Dekker and written by Sam Landman). When the host of one such children's religious show Gospel Gus dies, six former child stars (Angela Fox, Eric Eichenlaub, Jennifer D'Lynn, Natavia Lewis, Ryan Voss, and Tom S. Tea) are reunited for a special tribute show. They've all gone different directions in their lives and have very different feelings about the show and their experience but reluctantly agree to come back to the same studio to film the special. But weird things are happening there, the producer Serge (Michael David Postle) is up to something nefarious, and we soon see spirits, and puppets coming to life, and people dying; it's a little like Willy Wonka as these former kids disappear one by one - will anyone escape?! The puppets (designed by Marc Berg and Thalia Kostman) are truly impressive, detailed, and creepy, the blood and gore effects the most elaborate in my limited selection of shows (and smelled like chocolate), and a late appearance by Andrew Erskine Wheeler as the not-so-dead Gus is the icing on this horror cake. This show is a beautifully chaotic mess involving so many artists and art forms (also including lighting effects and live sound effects), about friendship, fame, and the dangerous places evangelism can go.
