Masque Macabre

'Tis the season, of course, for Edgar Allan Poe – adjacent shows in Chicago and elsewhere. With its world premiere of "Masque Macabre", Strawdog Theatre Company embraces the anthology approach to the American master of horror and experiments with a masked, movable, immersive experience to launch its 31st season.

The show, written by ensemble members Aly Renee Amidei and John Henry Roberts, as well as company member Cara Beth Heath, draws on a mix of Poe's greatest hits, as well as some of his deeper cuts. Together with the self-directed, self-paced nature of the show, this results in seasonal fare that sets itself apart from the usual.

This begins with the whole-world transformation of the company's relatively new space into distinct and dynamic "stages." The whole audience begins in the starkly white lobby bar, where some of the supporting players simply mingle with the masked guests, and others wrestle for control of the event.

The latter group includes the event planner, who vibrates with anxiety; a YouTube celebrity armed with a selfie stick and a livestream to his loyal audience of middle school "ravens;" the tortured artist who seems to know both he and his work are simply along for the ride; the object of the artist's waxing and waning affections; the beyond-flamboyant Viceroy who owns the gallery; and the exhibition's erratic, uber-wealthy patron, Preston. Each, at one point or another, willingly or unwillingly takes the stage, providing some guidance for the emotional dynamics that loosely bind the narratives together.

But the physical space (scenic design by Tom Burch) and the production's visuals (lighting by Shelbi Arndt, Claire Chrzan and Daniel Friedman; absolutely exquisite costumes by Virginia Varland; props by Lacie Hexom) are even more crucial to providing unity to the audience's experiences.

The white lobby, with its panoply of wall-mounted lamps, gives way to a room crammed with flatscreens in various states of disrepair filled with gruesome images of surgeries in progress, as well as providing a voyeuristic peek at cast and audience occupying other spaces simultaneously (impressive video and media design by Kyle Hamman). On the opposite wall hangs a grid work of push-button phones, some of which broadcast a variety of disjointed noises, some of which hang silent.

This gives way to a workshop, where a frantic man in safety gear pleads for better equipment, better materials, and off this is a storage room piled high with boxes. Other spaces include a floor-to ceiling storage cage filled with glass skulls, a small private dressing room, a narrow pass-through bathroom decoupaged with text from Poe (some of which glows under a blacklight), a small private dressing room fronted by an open space with a clawfoot tub, and a gold room suggesting an exotic boudoir with a gold fabric "cage" dominating the center. Much of the action, including the play's climax, occurs in the large black "party room."

The spaces are at once disorienting and inviting. The audience is instructed to neither open any closed doors, nor to leave any space with an object in tow, but this leaves room for the audience to interact with a variety of props and cast members to invade off-limits spaces and play out parts of their dramas as we listen in.

Although the front-of-house personnel and the cast do a good job preparing the audience for an unusual experience and moving them through the physical and narrative space, it's advisable to enter with some knowledge of the show's mechanics, particularly if the theater-goer might find it frustrating to experience fragments of less familiar stories or miss out on the use of some spaces entirely. For example, having gone through the space clockwise, I missed out on any goings-on in the gold boudoir entirely.

That said, I can't imagine what processes the three directors (Janet Howe, Anderson Lawfer and Eli Newell) employed in collaboration with one another and the cast to pull this off as well as they do, but giving oneself over to the immersive experience pays off. As tension builds in one space, the catharsis of violence echoes from the far-off reaches of another. As one cast member plots coldly, another works themselves to a fevered pitch that makes its way around corners or suddenly confronts the audience on a dying LCD screen, a phone that abruptly lights up red, and so on. The production is far less about watching the fairly predictable horror of any given drama play out than it is stepping inside the fevered, devilish mind that produced horror from both the mundane and the macabre.

It's challenging to comment on individual cast performances, given that this goes well beyond an ensemble piece. However, Julian Stroop certainly stands out as the Viceroy, embodying the slightly nauseating decadence that evokes Poe's period pieces. His flitting performance contrasts well with Henry Greenberg's Preston, who always seems seconds away from physical violence. Shaina Schrooten (Berenice) and Laura Nelson (Annabel) both breathe impressive, terrifying life into female characters that read as afterthoughts on the page.

Ella Raymont (Sam, the House Manager) and Andrew Bailes (Eli, the Artist), appear to be everywhere at once. Raymont's hyper-capable vibe in combination with the fact that she's often at the epicenter of violence invites giddy laughter that helps to bleed off tension. Bailes, appropriately, leaves despair in his wake, infusing the proceedings with entirely appropriate despair.

"Masque Macabre" runs through October 31 at Strawdog Theatre Company,
1802 W Berenice Ave., Chicago. For tickets, call 773-644-1380 or visit www.strawdog.org