‘Wicked Lit’ 2018 Turns Back The Clock, And Not Always For the Best (The NoPro Review)
The LA Spooky Season perennial’s natural old school charm crashes into the cultural realties of 2018
For ten years, Unbound Productions has charmed Los Angeles audiences with their annual productions of Wicked Lit — a series of short spooky plays in immersive environments. Usually staged at the Mountain View Mausoleum, the plays are adapted from classic horror works by the likes of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, and Washington Irving. Easy and accessible, Wicked Lit often feels geared toward traditional theatre goers, requiring no audience participation, and often blending elements of slapstick with elements of the uncanny. Yet their inventive set design, beautiful costumes, and dramatic atmospheres have made them a draw for the immersive crowd, and for the past few years they have been something of a Halloween staple.
This year’s production continued the tradition of competent, eerie Halloween fun. Both plays were hosted by cheerful in-character guides, who managed a cautious and gracious balancing act: evoking the spooky and macabre while also respecting the wholly earthly and mundane interments that have taken place in the mausoleum. Both productions featured bubbly, enthusiastic actors; beautiful set design; and clever use of space, utilizing projectors, color-changing lights, and strategic plunges into darkness to create a sense of dynamic, changing environments. Aesthetically, aside from some Irish accent stumbles, both plays were genuinely beautiful.
Yet, as the night wore on, a theme seemed to emerge. It’s a thin line, Wicked Lit seemed to think, between an abusive cur and The Man He Could Be; and moving men across that line, for the sake of their starry-eyed beloveds, was the impetus behind both plays. The result was, perhaps inadvertently, a moralizing lesson about the motives and needs of abusive men, one that felt both out-of-place and deeply muddled. (Spoilers follow.)
The Chimes, based on Charles Dickens’ 1844 novella, follows an elderly gentleman named Toby, who harshly sends his daughter Meg and her fiancé Richard away when he learns of their engagement. That night, in a Christmas Carol-esque vision, Toby is visited by supernatural spirits who show him Meg and Richard’s potential dark future without him. (In financial distress, scholarly Richard is forced to take a job on the docks, where after several years he becomes coarse, angry, and abusive, even hitting Meg in the face. Ultimately, unable to survive without Richard, Meg plies their baby with wine and leaps from a bridge to her death. Standard family fare.) Horrified, Toby awakens from his vision having learned the lesson that poverty begets undeserved misery, and that even the best of people may be undone by the relentless pressures of their environment.
Teig O’Kane and the Corpse, based on a 1921 short story by Ernest Rhys, involves a similar supernatural object lesson. Selfish and narcissistic, Teig O’Kane is a young man with so little respect for his girlfriend that, when he finds out she is pregnant, he immediately abandons her. But on his way home, he is beset by a frightened animated Corpse, who is struggling to adjust to his own mortality. Supernaturally “stuck” with the Corpse, Teig must help the Corpse find a proper final resting place in order to be free. As he watches the Corpse’s memories fade, losing all sense of self and of loved ones, Teig comes to understand what’s important in life, and ultimately mends his relationship with his credulous and forgiving girlfriend.
In the eras in which they were originally written, these stories doubtless felt radical and necessary. Dickens, for instance, was anxious to break down class barriers: hence his emphasis on the effect that environment has on character. “You would be no better,” he seems to say, “if you were a product of these hideous situations.” But in 2018, one feels considerably more concern for the patient women who somehow, despite their oppressive environments, manage not to batter or abandon their partners. Forced to serve as symbolic figures in men’s journeys of self-discovery, both Teig’s girlfriend and Meg are deprived of any chance for depth. And they deserve better.
The Chimes ends with Toby calling to his daughter, enlightened after his vision of the future. I think some of us hoped he would warn her about Richard’s outrageous entitlement, his violent tendencies. Instead, several audience members recoiled as Toby warmly gave Meg and Richard his blessing to marry. The lesson, it appeared, was that Richard would never have abused Meg if he’d had proper support…a lesson much more twisted, perhaps, than Wicked Lit intended.
Ultimately, the content of both plays felt out-of-date, and deeply mismatched with the family-friendly vibe that Wicked Lit is known for. Unbound Productions has proven themselves capable in delivering strong technical expertise, high quality production design, and clever choreography. Hopefully as they continue to build their annual tradition, they’ll build out a library of well-considered and timely scripts as well — stories where men take responsibility for their own actions.
Wicked Lit’s 2018 run continues through November 10. Tickets are $40–45. The production may contain mature themes, theatrical violence, and is
recommended for audiences ages 13+.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by:
…and our generous Patreon backers: join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium web site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.
