The other evening, I saw three Lovecraft stories adapted for the stage.

I learned a few things from the experience:

1. No stage production of Lovecraft should ever take itself too seriously. This is the kiss of death.
2. Puppets, however good, will never quite cut it. They should be used sparingly and in low light, or with full consciousness of the cheese factor, or both.
3. Nobody knows what a trapezehedron looks like.

For those who don't know, Howard Phillip Lovecraft was a gentleman from Providence, Rhode Island who wrote some truly excellent horror in the first half of the twentieth century. His creepy tales of Things from Beyond the Universe, and particularly his inventive Cthulhu Mythos stories, have influenced many writers who are favorites here at Green Man, including Marion Zimmer Bradley, Neil Gaiman, and Roger Zelazny.

From Beyond, adapted by Lyam White, directed by Matt Fontaine

A young photographer visits a friend, a professor whom he much admires. But young John is in for a surprise, as Crawford Tillinghast has become obsessed with expanding the human senses past the five we have been given. John, naturally, thinks his friend mad. Unfortunately for him, just because Tillinghast is mad doesn't mean he's wrong.

During W.W.II, just as the television is introduced and Nikola Tesla announces his death ray, a radio station owned by the widow Marsh produces "The Hunter of the Dark," H.P. Lovecraft's final short story, as a radio play. As the writer in the story descends into madness and is consumed by the Hunter, those who work at the station act more and more strangely. What is the strange box brought by sound effects man Hans Ewer? Does it actually contain the "shining trapezehedron" of the story? What did the guests at Old Man Marsh's parties do after the party was over?

Wilbur Whateley, last son of the Whately clan which has always been steeped in the evil surrounding Dunwich, wants the Necronomicon that is kept at Miskatonic University. His mother Lavinia is a twisted albino, no one knows who or what his father was, and Wilbur himself has grown to manhood in half the time usually required. With the incantations from the dread Book of the Names of the Dead, he hopes to summon forth Yog Sothoth... Who knows why?

Seattle's Open Circle Theater is a tiny little space, with perhaps a total of fifty seats and the front row actually sitting on the stage. The stage itself is a postage stamp, requiring lots of creative blocking and sets. It is very much the type of theater I've always wanted to work in myself, as the limitations of space and budget force everyone involved to be even more creative to make up for it.

You might say that the qualities of the show as a whole could be boiled down to the Good, the Bad, and the Pleasantly Cheesy:

The Good:

Most of the acting in all three pieces. The actors didn't take themselves too seriously, and were perfectly melodramatic. Exactly right for Lovecraft. The only place where some of the acting seemed a bit off was in "From Beyond" (see below), which I believe was due to the director, as the same actors did very well in both of the other pieces.

The Hunter of the Dark. Rob D'Art realized that his chosen Lovecraft tale would work very poorly on stage (it's written as a police report containing journal entries), so he didn't try to present it that way. Instead, he gave it a charming and chilling framing sequence, loaded with details from the period that made it very believable. (I was particularly pleased with the mention of Tesla, an historical figure I much admire.) The station crew's characters were well-thought-out, with the crusty veteran newsreader and the stuck-up voice actor sniping at one another, the young engineer bubbling with enthusiasm and geekiness, and the sound man slapping hands away from his precious props and producing excellent effects. Very creepy, very funny, quite, quite good.

The Bad:

From Beyond. I haven't read a lot of Lovecraft, but I do prefer the occult stuff to the mad science stuff. If this story had been better directed, I would have been willing to forget that, but it seemed as if the director took it too seriously. He wanted too badly to scare the audience - and Lovecraft just isn't terrifying on stage. It's a psychological sort of horror. It needs to get inside your head and crawl around, and it needs internalized words to do that. Horror on stage or screen is very different from horror on the page. About the best you can hope for from Lovecraft stage productions is mildly creepy.

The use of the puppets in From Beyond. Some of the individual puppets were pretty good (I liked the moth-thing), but they could've been used to much better effect. The puppeteers should have been better covered in black (face masks, gloves), the sticks longer, and the lighting more tightly focused if the puppets were going to work well.

There weren't enough tentacles in the radio gear in Hunter. The tentacles looked good, and were operated well, but there ought to have been more than two.

The hicks in Dunwich (which is, I believe, in Massachusetts) all seemed to have Southern redneck accents, as if no one knew any other hick accent.

The Pleasantly Cheesy:

The Dunwich Horror. John McKenna looked as if he was basing his interpretation of Dr. Armitage on the Narrator from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which worked very well). Kate Kray as Lavinia Whately had a wonderful hunch and an unbelievable-yet-fitting set of false teeth. The puppets representing Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice as they went up to confront the Horror didn't even try to be serious, and so worked a great deal better than the Things-from-Beyond puppets in the first offering. The puppet for the Horror itself was used sparing enough to be quite effective (even if it did leave a piece of itself draped over the top of the hill where the stones stood).

Dmitri Arbacauskas's extremely melodramatic introduction to the whole thing. "Your programs, like yourselves, are recyclable. Please deposit them in the box outside the theater door after the show."