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WEB EXTRA | Photo Slideshow
Tom Fudge: The Old Globe has The Grinch . San Diego Rep has A Christmas Carol and now Sledgehammer Theater has Seven Crimes . Sledgehammer would like audiences to come to them each Halloween to see Seven Crimes , a lurid trilogy of Grand Guignol Theater. KPBS' Beth Accomando ventured down to Sledgehammer's 10th Avenue Theater for this behind-the-scenes look.
Sledgehammer's Seven Crimes runs through November 4th at the 10th Avenue Theater in downtown San Diego.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
To put me in the mood for Seven Crimes , I'm led down a dark alley behind the theater, a place where Jack the Ripper would certainly feel at home. Here I'm to meet the play's Mistress of Ceremonies, a dominatrix who looks like a cross between a Kurt Weill prostitute and Rocky Horror's Magenta.
Mei Ling Downey: My name is Mei Ling Downey, I play the MC as well as some minor parts in the show and the show is Seven Crimes . Basically I'm the Rod Serling of the show so host it, and guide the audience along keep them awake, by whatever means necessary, whipping, yelling whatever.
Getting an audience's attention by whatever means necessary is what Grand Guignol is all about. As used today, the term refers to works that deal in the macabre, and favor lurid tales filled with graphic violence. The term is derived from the tiny Parisian theater that horrified audiences for some six decades beginning in 1897. A typical evening at the Grand Guignol Theatre might consist of a handful of short plays ranging from crime dramas to sex farces, but always with a horror show featuring eye-gouging, throat-slashing, acid-throwing, assorted dismemberment or some other grisly crime. By the 1960s, the Grand Guignol had fallen into relative obscurity, but not before it had left profound mark on the horror genre that can still be felt today.
Playwright Dave Rosenthal translated three Grand Guignol plays from French to English and packaged them into a trilogy called Seven Crimes for Sledgehammer Theater. To create this theatrical event, Rosenthal drew on the history of the Grand Guignol Theater and the fact that it was located in one of France's most notorious sex districts. So the idea of a dominatrix inviting people into the theater is slyly appropriate.
Downey: Welcome to the Grand Guignol, for your safety we keep a doctor in house to revive the fainters, doctor…tonight you will see the darkest parts of the human heart and people who find every torment a form of temptation.
And Rosenthal wanted to tap into that sense of temptation.
Dave Rosenthal: There was a sense of when you were going to the theater that some of that sexual excitement was there so our idea of creating a mistress of ceremonies to integrate the night of three plays but to decide to make her a dominatrix, a welcomer to this house of disturbing desires.
Dominatrix Singing : I bet you've come for terror and a night of guilty tricks…
Scott Feldsher: You know the thing I like about Grand Guignol is it isn't necessarily moralistic.
Director Scott Feldsher.
Feldsher: It says this is how people are, they are passionate and when they are passionate they can be evil, and they can do very bad things to other people and it doesn't really moralize about it.
Feldsher also likes the way the Grand Guignol mixed two existing theater styles of the period.
Feldsher: So what Grand Guignol was doing was a hybrid of naturalism and melodrama. They tried to create characters who had heightened passions, but the staging and definitely the murders were very graphic and naturalistic.
Rosenthal: And at that time it was avant-garde theater and some of what they did was they picked current event stories that were somewhat shocking to the bourgeouisie and presented in realistic fashion and broke 4th wall so the audience was implicated in what was taking place on stage... The person that started Grand Guignol had been working with naturalist theater and he was also a secretary for police and he was taking real crimes stories and putting them on stage.
And speaking of the stage, set designer Nikki Black took me on a tour of the visually striking set.
Nikki Black: Obviously one of our problems was having to come up with three sets and the inspiration was the old German film Dr. Caligari. We wanted very strange angles and very presentational aesthetic as well and Dr. Caligari there was this great collaboration between the movement of the actors and the angles of the sets and the painting effects of the sets.
The film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a classic ex38le of early German Expressionism. Made in 1920, the story involved a mad doctor, his sleepwalking assistant, and their connection to a bizarre string of murders. Visually the film defied conventions as it created sets with sharp angles and perversely skewed perspectives, all distorted further by severe shadows.
Black: Scott wanted to recreate that on the stage so the actors have very overemphasized movements and angles to their body to contrast with the set itself.
To complement the visual elements is sound man Scott Paulson.
Scott Paulson: I'm surrounded by a barrage of noisemakers I'll be doing live sounds everything form flexitones which make scary sounds. I also love using my autoharp it's very 4th grade school teacher chic but instead of pressing the buttons I just… or I can be a grandfather clock… or I can be psycho killer… slapstick… siren whistle… some very scary and some very over the top… this show is not for children.
Definitely not for children. Take the opening play, The Awful Pleasure about a femme fatale who has it in for her spouse.
Rosenthal: Awful pleasure some of the darkest things in terms of human psychology and sexual psychology.
Costumer Mary Larson saw it as a tango.
Mary Larson: I found some research pictures of people tangoing and posters and what I found were beautiful skirts for the women and tuxes for the men. So they go that direction…
Composer and sound designer Pea Hicks saw this as a rare opportunity to play with clichés.
Pea Hicks: The character in the first play is from Mexico, so instantly I wanted to have as much Spanish guitar as possible, to make the wrong cultural references. And so the song at the end of that has this very lamenting Spanish flavor to it.
From zombies and femme fatales south of the border, the play moves to a barbershop in Barstow, the setting of Seven Crimes where there might be a little blood involved.
Larson: Just a little! We have blood in all three, secret hiding places for weapons and secret hiding places for blood… and it gets all over the clothes. [Did that create problems for you?] Not me but for props she had to make blood to wash out, difficult to make beautiful blood… and has to wash out.
Pearl Hodges: Well let's see, we're using four types of blood. Let me tell you it's not easy to create.
Bloodmaker Pearl Hodges.
Hodges: I'm premixing everything myself. I'm using let's see water and children's finger paint and food coloring and laundry detergent and hair gel and all sorts of stuff goes into this blood glycerin all sorts of different things to make it work. Like I said four types of it go into one show. For ex38le there's a thinner more watery blood that works for spraying, a thicker more viscose thing that works for big cuts and then blood that can be made in huge volume for very little money because we are on a limited budget here.
But creating special effects from nothing was a trademark of the original Grand Guignol Theater says writer Dave Rosenthal.
Rosenthal: One of the actors, became exceptionally good at the blood, cutting off someone's head in a small theater and making it seem like it really happened and there was an enormous amount of techniques to trick the audience into making them believe that someone's arm had been cut off or someone have acid thrown in their face and their skin decompose in front of them.
Or possibly reanimating a dead corpse with a gizmo called a dynamo in the final play, The Terrible Experiment .
Hodges: If it's not bolted down or attached to an actor. I put it on the stage. That's what I do.
Again Pearl Hodges, this time explaining the bizarre contraption called the dynamo which works like an early version of a defibrillator.
Hodges: From a prop standpoint most of the credit for its creation goes to my dad he's my one man prop shop, Dan Hodges… as for the way it works its made from piles of recycled parts, old bicycle parts… would you like to know how it actually runs from a prop stand point or a theatrical standpoint… How about a little of both…we have our questionably obscene probes which he uses to revive his daughter, we have our lights which reveal the voltage of the machine, we have the lovely flywheels which generate the power and all attached to a lightening rod to gather power to run our fabulous machine.
This sounds an awful lot like Universal's old Frankenstein movie with Boris Karloff.
Feldsher: Totally yeah, all the plays are really interesting they were written in the early twentieth century and there's a lot of distrust of doctors and science… definitely in the Terrible Experiment which is a complete Frankenstein riff.
And what does a Frankenstein riff need in order to be complete?
Paulson: Obviously the theremin for the spooky spooky moments. That's a crowd pleaser.
And pleasing the crowd is something that Grand Guignol is always good at. Maybe that's because one of the first producers was also a PR wiz who knew how to create the kind of gimmicks that would attract and delight audiences.
Rosenthal: Grand Guignol is the place where they perfected that style, blood on the stage, people would faint, they actually initially had the first producer of Grand Guignol was a big PR guy so it was half PR move and half people who fainted so he brought a house doctor that was in the house every night and if someone fainted he would take care of them and there was a time when he would check if people were health enough to come in to this kind of theater.
You won't need a flu shot to get into Sledgehammer Theater, but their production of Seven Crimes might be the perfect antidote to the warm and fuzzy holiday season that's fast approaching. Don't miss your last chance for...
Song: Murder, mayhem and perversion…
