I’m not a big fan of being scared. My mantra has long been that the world is frightening enough without stories that make my hair stand on end. But maybe I’ve reached an age where my threshold for such tales has inched upward. A year ago I was sucked into Stranger Things on Netflix and ended up binging it in a few days.
More recently, I needed to fill a few evening hours while out of town; my only option was a movie theater with one screen showing Stephen King’s It. Well, sure, there were moments when I was startled and a few that horrified me. But no bad dreams afterwards. So maybe I’m inoculated.
The latest test for my newfound resilience is Know Theatre’s Halloween Horror Double Bill, which opened last Friday and is onstage through Nov. 4. With 13 “dead dreams” and three zombie episodes, it’s adding up to evenings of off-kilter October entertainment for Know audiences.
I had a chance to sit down recently with the creators of the bill’s first half, 13 Dead Dreams of “Eugene.” Paul Strickland and Erika Kate MacDonald are familiar to Cincy Fringe fans with funny, punning stories from the “Big Fib Trailer Park” and a joint show, Tales Too Tall for Trailers. Over the past couple of years, they’ve been involved with several productions at Know, including Andy’s House of [BLANK] and last season’s Darkest Night at the Gnarly Stump.
Over the summer they performed at Fringe festivals across Canada. Now they’re back in town and polishing up Dead Dreams, which they debuted a year ago at the Twin Cities Horror Festival.
Strickland’s fertile storytelling imagination had a jump start when he and MacDonald chanced upon Sabina, Ohio, an hour north of Cincinnati, and heard a weird true story from the tiny town’s past. An unidentified man was found dead there in 1929 and embalmed, in hopes that someone might identify him.
The only shred of evidence to his identity was a slip of paper in his coat pocket with a Cincinnati street address that proved to be an empty lot. The name of a neighbor got connected to the deceased, and he came to be known as Eugene, visited by hundreds of thousands of curiosity seekers. After 35 years of display in an outbuilding adjacent to a Sabina funeral home, he was finally buried — still unknown.
Strickland and MacDonald used this story as the springboard for 13 Dead Dreams of “Eugene.” The show’s Minneapolis premiere went well, MacDonald says. “Horror as a genre is honestly not at the top of a lot of people’s lists. But we were getting more and more excited about the possibilities of shadow puppetry.” (That’s her particular expertise.) “We thought, I don’t know if we can do scary, but we can do creepy!”
That’s the atmosphere they strove for. Strickland calls the enacted dreams “micro-stories” within the narrative. Using a premise that ghosts don’t know who they are at first, details from mourners calling out a name or reminiscing at a funeral begin to fill in the blanks. The play’s stories, in the form of “shared recurring nightmares” among the citizens of Sabina, tell us more about Eugene’s persona and motive.
Strickland, a trained singer and musician, has written three full-length songs, as well as other musical moments. “I wrote all of the underscoring on piano and guitar for the whole piece,” he says. “Some of it I perform live, some is tracked.” He says it resembles their Tales Too Tall for Trailers in its episodic nature, “But otherwise it is wildly different than anything else we have done.”
In repertory with Strickland and MacDonald’s production is The Zombie Odyssey, a trilogy of solo-performance tales created by Ricky Coates. Blending physical theater and radio drama, Coates plays a zombie on an epic journey to reunite with his wife, enacted by Sadie Bowman, a former Know Theatre employee and past Fringe performer. Ticketed separately, Coates’ and Bowman’s episodes are performed each evening after Dead Dreams for the run, through Nov. 4. There are also weekend matinees. Go to knowtheatre.com for details.
It adds up to some seriously creepy fun.
CONTACT RICK PENDER: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Oct 18-25, 2017.
