FRINGE: 2 SCARY horror shows
Meet Daniel, a typical working man exhausted after a hard day at the office. Alone and sad, he tromps into his ratty apartment and slumps into his cheap armchair. He is lonely, restless, with only his memories to keep him company. So he has a cocktail, or two, as he does every night. He drinks to forget, and to remember, and sometimes he can’t tell one from another and in a haze of confusion once again falls into a deep sleep, the empty whiskey bottle falling from his hand.
Little does Daniel know he is about to have a visit from … the “Terrors.”
Cue six good dancers with evil intentions. Their sudden appearance on stage is a true fright in Nightmare (Stage 18).
Perhaps like some performance art episode of The Twilight Zone, there are chilling moments in this tale of man (Cliff Smith) coming to grips with the sins of his past, and who in his dreams – his nightmares – is tormented by six female demons. They dance seductively, they caress him, they taunt him, they hit him and they kick him when he’s down. Then they laugh. He wakes up in a cold sweat.
Performed by the six dancers in Celtic Raine Productions, Nightmare is good hook to present a revue of some of the spookiest dance routines you’ll ever see. The numbers go on a bit too long, sometimes breaking the narrative, but they sure are creepy. The dancers are dressed in grotesque parodies of an Earthly dance troupe: modern dance, ballet, can-can, and the one with the skirts and lollipops being especially creepy. Some dancers are horribly disfigured. They are all gleeful in their cruelty towards their hapless captive dreamer.
“Oh, please, not again!” the poor man begs, but to no avail. Night after night the Terrors return – each “routine” more violent and frightening than the last, until he can’t take it anymore.
Beautifully-filmed interludes add a disturbing edge to the proceedings (and allow dancers to change costumes), with low-fi Super 8-like videos depicting events in Daniel’s happy life – or was it so happy after all?
With a gut-wrenching, hideous twist at the end of this visually-arresting show, the truth will haunt the Daniel to his grave.
4 out of 5
***
One has to appreciate the irony of staging a play that’s set in the deepest pit of hell in one of the Fringe’s least air-conditioned venues. Oh, how these artists suffer for their art – and their audience with them.
Ahunwar: The Devil’s Long Nap (Stage 15, the smallish “Cool Air Rentals Stage” – HA! – in the Holy Trinity) begins with a man (Braden Butler) sleeping in a big bed. He’s even covered with a wool blanket.
As the play proper begins, we learn this is not a normal man having a normal nap. It’s the devil – and he has a name, Ahriman. He’s been dozing for 3,000 years. Then along comes his demon minion Jeh (Christina Nguyen) to wake him up – geez, just 5 more years, OK?! – and the sparks begin to fly. Understandably a bit grumpy, Ahriman doesn’t remember where he is or even that he’s the devil. Kind of a big thing to forget.
Jeh seems a little foggy on her role, too. Plus they’re trapped in a cave deep in the Earth (or in another dimension), with no visible means of escape. Ahriman just wants to go back to sleep, to dream his troubles away. Jeh has other ideas.
This intense but rather confusing two-hander is riddled with the sort of paranormal-geek dialogue that would’ve been cut from Dan Aykroyd’s lines in Ghostbusters 2 – a lot of material about cosmic wars, good vs. evil, inscrutable prophets, bizarre demons, and the second comings of Ahriman and/or Zarathustra (the latter the subject of a book by Nietzsche) and a lot more lore from Zoroastrian mythology. It’s the world’s oldest monotheistic religion, and like others that could come later – like Christianity and Islam – it preaches the power of good while warning that the forces of evil are never far away.
3 out of 5
One Response to FRINGE: 2 SCARY horror shows