by RICK DANLEY // February 28, 2019
There are times when a small-town reporter, reviewing a local theatrical event, is obligated, out of kindness, to fudge the truth, to conceal from the reading public the production’s major blemishes and emphasize instead what a good job! everyone did or how great the costumes looked.
But then, very occasionally, you’re blown away.
The Allen Community College Theatre Department’s production of Nic Olson’s “Five Short Plays to Frighten and Amuse,” an anthology of student-directed one-acts, is so jam-packed with original talent that by simply choosing to attend the show — which runs Thursday-Saturday — you are automatically improving your chances at happiness.
Of course it helps if you have a taste for the macabre. Each brief comedy is built around some aspect of the lurid extreme — brain-eating zombies, murderous bachelorettes, awakened ghosts — but the verbal surface of each short piece glitters with wit and insight.
The five scenarios are directed to terrific effect by ACC students Austin Wickwire, Paige Durand, Judd Wiltse, Padyne Durand, and recent grad Chloe Bedell. The acting in each play is expert; the set designs are smart and idiosyncratic; the stage blocking flawless. But theater remains a playwright’s medium, and the real luminary on the night is Nic Olson, whose dark comic voice is rendered with an effervescent touch. While its lexicon is strictly absurdist and the story lines are deliciously over the top, the writing draws its real energy from the art Olson is able to forge from the raw content of human emotion.
In “Post-Maniac Victim Syndrome,” the surviving teenage heroine of a slasher-movie scenario visits a psychoanalyst, who attempts, through a medically dubious but ultimately well-meaning form of immersion therapy, to give the girl the courage to confront her past traumas and the tools to cope with any new threat that might lumber into her life — like, say, if you’re home alone and a guy with a mask cuts your phone line and appears at your darkened window with a blood-wet machete.
Or “REAL GHOST FOOTAGE — CAUGHT ON CAMERA — 100% GENUINE,” in which the biggest, baddest demon of the underworld — at least as he fancies himself — has to contend with the limp effect he actually invokes when attempting to terrorize humankind.
“Bob of the Dead” depicts a dimwitted former corporate middle-manager (now a brain-devouring zombie), who attempts to inveigle his way into a gas station where his old co-worker — who, it turns out, doesn’t feel like having her brains made into sushi — is holed up. Bob relies on a series of failed disguises before realizing that the easiest way to penetrate human flesh is to attack its owner’s vanity.
In “The Game of Romance” — a spoof of the TV show “The Dating Game” — we encounter a hard-to-please female contestant whose main requirement in a mate is his inexhaustible capacity for homicide. And, boys, don’t think that generating a corpse or two will vibrate this lovely lady’s heart strings! Love, for our contestant, is at least a baker’s dozen.
The final one-act, “Camp Miskatonic,” gives us the ultra-perky camp counselor, Katie, and her less sprightly co-counselor, Yog — experienced flesh-eater and dark god of the underworld — who prefers to feast on adults, whose bodies have had the chance to marinate in the accumulated sadnesses and disappointments of grown-up life, as opposed to bright happy children, whose spirit of hope gives their meat a bitter taste.
The charnel influence of H.P. Lovecraft blows like a chill wind through all five one-acts. Olson has cited the early 20th-century writer as a primary inspiration for this suite of plays, and there are submerged references to the godfather of horror fiction scattered throughout (e.g. nods to Cthulhu, a canonical deity in the Lovecraftian universe; or to Rhode Island, the writer’s home state; or to Miskatonic, another landmark in the writer’s back catalog; and on and on). But Olson’s talent is not simply for miming the ready tropes of genre fiction. Rather, his primary skill is the way he is able to refract these timeless themes of death and anxiety through the lens of the current moment, and to make us laugh at what, in truth, we fear.
But the greatest testament to the novel ways that this young playwright is able to transform the blank page is this: after a 90-minute show about death, you emerge from the theater feeling more alive.
RG danley 