Trial by Jury

Bloody Bathory – The Barrens Theatre Company

In the early 1600s, in an isolated castle in the forests of Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Bathory is reputed to have murdered literally hundreds of her servant girls for the purposes of bathing in the blood of virgins to maintain her youth and beauty. It sounds like a story made up to scare children, but there was a real Countess and she was really convicted for countless murders, and bricked up in a room in her castle and left to die. Of course, the murder accusation may have been a plot cooked up by the monarchy to take her castle from her and eliminate a huge debt it owed to her family, but details, details, right?

This grim story forms the center of The Barrens Theatre new immersive show. Staged in a very large, very old church in the Edgewater, the audience forms the jury at Bathory’s trial. They will follow various threads of the story, seeing witness testimony and memories reenacted. Are those stories reliable? That’s for the audience to decide before they’re asked to render a verdict.

Immersive theater is a tough balancing act, and by picking the Epworth United Methodist Church for the venue, Barrens has bitten off a lot. It’s a huge space, covering three floors and at least half a dozen areas for the action to unfold. Keeping up and picking which thread to follow is a bit more complicated than something like Windy City Playhouse’s Southern Gothic, which confines the action to a small set of three adjacent rooms. At points, the characters even go outside. Aside from wondering what they’ll do if it rains or what the neighbors must think, the weird clash of people out walking their dogs with the Archduke of Austria-Hungary plotting the Countess’ downfall at the top of her lungs somehow made the action more effective for me, not less. Overall, I won’t say the space overwhelms the production, but it does come as close as it can without doing so. That said, there is an undeniable thrill to being surrounded by a ghost story in an otherwise empty and massive church in the middle of the night.

The story presents enough evidence to influence but never outright force a decision. That would be too easy. Bathory may not be history’s most profligate serial killer, but something is clearly going on. And even if the Archduke is rightfully horrified by the stories he’s heard, his hands definitely aren’t clean in all this, and you’re left with the impression that if he thought it was to his advantage to leave her alone, he would do so, murderess or not. My one complaint is that ambiguity, stretched out as it is over space and broken in pieces, doesn’t quite hang together by the end the way I would want it to, but that may be as much an artifact of which parts I happened to see rather than an issue with the show as a whole.

The actors up and down the line are great. The play’s writer, Millie Rose plays the title role with all the imperious charm the part requires. Maggie Miller as the judge presiding over Bathory’s trial and Stephanie Mattos as the Archduke are other standouts for me. Both nailed the slightly arch manner this kind of story requires. Keeping all the parts moving and synced is no small task, and if there was a missed cue somewhere, I didn’t see it.

For whatever quibbles I’ve raised about the story or the staging, I cannot deny that this show was fun. It is positively dripping in atmosphere. It has all of the dark, alluring energy of a Gothic horror novel and is just as enjoyable to slip into. The actors are very talented and giving it their all, and the cumulative effect is heady to say the least. This is the perfect group activity now that Halloween is almost here.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented October 1 – November 16 by The Barrens Theatre Company at Epworth United Methodist Church at 5253 N. Kenmore, Chicago.

Tickets can be purchased at www.thebarrenstheatreco.com.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.