Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Three Stories Up – Theatre in the Dark

On a rainy afternoon in Vancouver, a local transit police officer comes home to find her husband, also a police officer, murdered. For reasons she can’t understand, the police department wants to dismiss it as a suicide. She starts down a dangerous path to her husband’s last case and the network of criminal informants he worked with. Many plays have tackled the noir mystery, but non in quite the way that Theatre in the Dark does. This show is staged in pitch black darkness.

The show premiered in Vancouver and is getting a Chicago premier. The audience is blindfolded and led to their seats by members of the theatre. The lights are shut off before the audience removes their blindfolds. The effect leaves you into total darkness. You literally cannot see the hand in front of your face. Fortunately, if you ordered a cocktail before the show, a Saint brought it to your hand for you.

The question I always ask when seeing theater like this is whether it was worth the effort. Did the set up help the story or just get in the way? The question rolling around in my head as I walked into the theater was whether it would all work just as well as a podcast. Ultimately, the execution of this set up was pretty near perfect. It really was startling to not be able to see anything the entire time, and that did add a certain air to the story. The foley work was great as well and the sound happening all around you is something that wouldn’t come out the same way if I were listening with headphones. If I have a critique, it’s that I don’t think the darkness added to the story itself. I can’t help but think that a story that more explicitly worked the darkness into the narrative might have yielded a bigger result. I can see why a noir detective story works in this format, but I can’t help but wonder if outright horror might have been a better match.

That all said, the cast of two actors did a great job with the material. Bethanny Arrington as the widowed police officer at the center of the story does a great job breathing life into the grieving widow trying to make sense of tragedy. Mackenzie Gordon, also the playwright, has to cover a lot of ground as many characters, using accents and intonation to separate them.

In the end, I really enjoyed myself. I always like a juicy noir thriller, and whatever questions I about the why of the setup, I cannot deny that it was executed flawlessly, and was certainly something I had not experienced before. I certainly recommend catching this show before it closes next week, and I look forward to what else this theater company will have to offer.

Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented October 24 – November 9 by Theatre in the Dark at 1244 W. Thorndale, Chicago.

Tickets can be purchased at www.theatreinthedark.com.

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