10-26-07
Ghosts in the Footlights: Haunted performance spaces
Megan Baskin, Jenifer Henry, Kate Nawrocki, Sarah Scanlon, Delia Baseman, Liz Ladach-Bark, Anita Lambert, Laura Lippert, Emily Schwartz, Jennifer Marschand, Emily Knoblauch and Kara Klein surround Allan Roysdon in Strang Tree Group's Crucible the Musible.
Whether one calls it Halloween, Dia De Los Muertos, Samhain, or All Souls’ Day, for those who believe in such things, this time of year is when the veil between the living and the dead is said to be at its thinnest. Theatre, of course, is all about creating and tearing down veils between reality and artifice. So perhaps that’s why theatres, like churches, seem to call forth more than their share of hauntings.
It’s also the time of year when dressing up in outrageous costumes and pretending to be someone else is heartily encouraged, which explains why Halloween is a High Holy Day for many theatres, and—spiritual beliefs aside—an opportunity to cash in on the inherently theatrical nature of the season. (See sidebar for Halloween-themed shows).
Some artists have figured out a way to combine their craft and their environment for an optimal haunting experience. David Parr has been performing The Magic Cabaret upstairs at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre since June of this year, partnering with his fellow magician P.T. Murphy and various guest prestidigitators (see sidebar). The two men end each show with a Victorian-style “spirit cabinet” that often draws on the strange energies and celebrated history of the Biograph, famous in its former incarnation as the movie theatre where gangster John Dillinger saw his final film in 1934, before being gunned down by G-men in the adjacent alley.
Says Parr, “There have been some very vague and unsubstantiated reports over the years that people have either seen some kind of apparition in the theatre or felt cold spots in the theatre specifically connected to Dillinger. The apparition that is reported by people many times in the alley just south of the theatre is often connected to Dillinger. That particular ghost is seen running down the alley and stumbles and falls.” (Most “ghost tour” companies in Chicago include a stop at the Biograph alley in their itinerary.)
In a nod to the season, Parr says that he and Murphy “are honoring some of the traditions of Halloween. In the past, Halloween was a grown-up holiday, not a children’s holiday. It was a time when adults could mingle in a place where the social constraints were loosened a bit from what they would normally do. They would often do divination games, fortune-telling games. It usually was about the question as to whether one would find the perfect mate, though questions about careers or financial stuff would also come up. So we’re doing a little fortune-telling divination in the show.”
Asked whether he himself has ever experienced anything in the paranormal range, Parr says circumspectly, “Over the years, I’ve seen one or two things that I can’t explain. Were they ghosts? I don’t know. I try very hard to maintain an open mind. Most things don’t fall on the side of belief or disbelief.”
Richard Engling has no doubt that what he saw back in 1980 in his Edgewater studio apartment was a ghost, and one with a grim back story. Engling first wrote his play Ghost Watch about his haunting experience 20 years ago. The now-defunct Chicago Actors Ensemble produced it, and a substantially revised version opens Nov. 2 at the Irish American Heritage Center in a production with Engling’s Polarity Ensemble Theatre (see sidebar).
Engling says his old apartment always had some bad energy to it. “It started out with just feeling really uncomfortable in the place and having nightmares. When I saw the apparition itself, I had gotten up late at night and saw this woman kneeling on the floor near the doorway. She was translucent and glowing white. I called out my girlfriend’s name, trying to test if it was her somehow. I was looking at her and she looked at me and towards the door—back and forth like that three times. She looked very frightened. That was a good long time that I was looking at her. She was about 10 feet away from me. It lasted about a minute, but it felt longer.”
Engling also says, “The other thing that was very creepy in there is that when I’d go through the doorway, I’d get this sense of somebody very angry there. When I’d walk through the doorway, for a moment I’d feel like I was very angry.” Engling got out of the apartment (located in the Broadway Bank building at Broadway and Elmdale) as soon as he could, but he couldn’t shake what he’d seen. He asked the building manager if anyone else had reported strange things in that unit, but the manager told him no—in fact, the manager himself had lived in the efficiency at one time without incident.
“I had this sense that the woman I saw had been killed by the man I felt by the door,” says Engling. “I came up with a scenario of what happened between them. And then I came up with the characters who would be drawn to research that and make a documentary about it, and making them driven enough people and people with dark enough pasts that they could be driven into the evil of the whole thing.”
“Necromancer” Neil Tobin of Supernatural Chicago (see sidebar) doesn’t view what he does as conjuring evil. Tobin performs every Friday night in the basement of the Excalibur nightclub, a building with a storied past. The Romanesque building on North Dearborn was once the home of the Chicago Historical Society. The earlier building on the site, widely believed to be fireproof, burned to the ground during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, taking the lives of a group of women who had sought shelter there. Tobin notes that people have long reported strange happenings in the nightclub, including lights without any apparent source flickering in dark hallways, cold spots, glass bottles thrown off shelves by unseen hands, and candles that re-ignite themselves after being extinguished.
Tobin maintains that his show is “macabre without being maudlin,” and that “it’s really funnier than you’d expect it to be.” Every year around Halloween, Tobin uses his spirit-divination skills to reach out to one particular figure from the past—Harry Houdini, who died on Halloween in 1926. The Houdini Seance pays homage to Victorian “spirit circles” and also to the memory of the magician and escape artist who spent many of his last years attempting to debunk mediums who preyed on the vulnerability of grieving people. (Houdini started visiting spiritualists after the death of his mother.)
For his part, Tobin says that though he has sometimes been asked to perform private seances, “I have no desire to be a grief counselor. So I’ve made the conscious decision to only do theatrical seances.” But some of his audience members still seek communion with deceased loved ones. Says Tobin, “I’ve had people tell me several times that they were close to a grandparent or loved one and wanted to be put in touch with them. On closer discussion, it turns out they’ve been having dreams about them in which they have conversations with them. And I have to tell them, ‘Your ideas of spirit contact are coming from television and movies. Who’s to say that what you’re already experiencing isn’t how you’re supposed to be in touch with them?’”
Of course, little in life is as truly frightening as those who do not heed the ghosts of the past—a fact that playwright Dave Buchen draws upon for his new historical treatise/absurdist farce, Spukt (pronounced “spooked,”) now in a world premiere with Theatre Oobleck (see sidebar). Buchen’s play follows the disastrous attempt by Napoleon to occupy Egypt. “He went in, won right away, and was forced to be an occupier, with ugly consequences. He himself snuck away after about a year. He basically left [his troops] there to die, but he completely spun it as a victory.”
(Ahem.)
And yet, aside from the frightening contemporary parallels drawn by Buchen’s play, there is an actual ghost in it. Like Agamemnon, Napoleon is killed by his wife when he returns from war and then haunts his “idiot” son, trying to convince his offspring to strangle his mother as an act of vengeance. (A side note: Theatre Oobleck once occupied the space above the Nelson Funeral Parlor on North Ashland that now houses the Neo-Futurarium. Though no one in the Neo-Futurists has reported anything out of the ordinary to my knowledge, I heard many vague stories about unexplained phenomena in the venue from the Oobleck days.)
Why do we enjoy scaring ourselves so much? Parr says, “In this country, we find that anything that’s old is slightly creepy to us. It’s not like that elsewhere. I think that’s just a factor of the relative youth of our country. We are sensitive to places where the weight of history is there.”
Chicago certainly has that weight. Says Parr, “Chicagoans are fond of our ghosts. It’s part of what makes the city an interesting place to live or visit. It’s part of the tapestry of being in the place. There’s this night side.”