Old-Fashioned Theater Meets Modern Themes in Beyond the Garden Gate.

On April 12, 2024, The Imposters Theatre Company debuted their new production, BEYOND THE GARDEN GATE, written by Mallory Swisher and directed by Stefan Rosen.

An ambitious, creative project, Beyond the Garden Gate tells the story of two sisters who came of age listening to the simultaneously comforting and unsettling fairytales of their grandmother. Now adults, the sisters are living through Grandma’s stories once again in a very unexpected and real way. When Maeve moves in with their grandmother, ostensibly to care for her ailing health, her younger sister Kat learns that Maeve has become entrenched in solving the mystery at the heart of the stories they always took for fantasy. As Grandma’s health continues to deteriorate, Maeve becomes convinced that defeating the curse echoed throughout the old fairytales will restore her Grandma’s vitality. Venturing into the world hidden beneath the garden at the edges of their backyard, Kat will follows her sister down the rabbit hole to the depths of the darkest fairytale. There, they face the darkness encroaching and the darkness within.

The Crosby Theater at the Den on Milwaukee is an intimate, black box theater, with roughly 60 seats. It was packed on opening night with an excited and supportive audience.

Set Designer and Technical Director Ethan Gasbarro did a wonderfull job with the staging, building a fairyland out of scant props, lights, and sound. Shades of green, gold and brown infuse the room the moment you enter. Puppet Designer Elyse Estes, and Props/SFX Designers Jessica Miller and Jackie Bobbitt demonstrated what can be done with a small space and a small budget. Shadow puppets were used to great effect as monsters and to convey movement. The sound design was appropriately creepy, with lots of echoes and repetition. The ensemble, or Fey, gleefully dove into their roles as dancing, creepy, hobgoblins, and Annika Anderson provided music live with a violin and some slightly inhuman looking dance moves.

The story opens when Kat (Maria Clara Ospina) comes to visit her grandmother (Hilary Sanzel), only to discover that her older sister, Maeve (Eliana Deckner-Glick) has been hiding out after dropping out of art school. She also claims to be helping their grandmother, who’s health has been mysteriously declining, by visiting the fairyland of their youth; a place that turns out to be very real, very dark, and very familiar to grandma.

Against her better judgement, Kat follows Maeve into the Land of the Fey, and discovers what she is made of. The story is a hodge-podge of familiar fantasy and coming-of-age tropes, with one sister the rule follower and one the rebel, overcoming self doubt, facing the truth about oneself, and women coming together to save themselves, and each other.

Deckner-Glick dives into her rebel-with-a-cause role with gusto, tromping about the stage with bravado. Sanzel is an appropriately loopy grandmother, and Jaclyn Jensen embraces her Dark Fairy Queen with an arch delight. The standouts are the Watcher (Jasmine Robertson), a creature who guards the space between the real world and the fairy one with an otherworldly glee, and Ospina, who does a particularly nice job of marrying the two styles of high fantasy and everyday language and experiences with believable sincerity. Her expressive face and genuine embrace of the fantastic and the mundane in the story makes her easy to root for.

As the sisters struggle with the dark powers of fairyland, the play takes a rather grisly turn; these are the sorts of dark fairies from old English and Irish stories who steal babies, torture humans and their loved ones, and make sneaky, tricky deals with anyone unlucky enough to cross their path. Kat must use all that she remembers from her grandmother’s creepy stories to get her and her family to safety.

The whole production has an old-fashioned feel. It reminds you of old fairy stories in that dark fairy book you might have found at the library, filled with terrible deals and curses. The use of shadow puppets and lighting only emphasizes the feeling that you’re watching a theater production from 150 years ago, when family and friends used to put up stories to amuse themselves during long, winter months to keep the darkness at bay.

At 90 minutes without an intermission, the play itself slips by, and left me thinking there was enough crammed in there that it could easily serve as the framework for a novel. Writer Mallory Swisher clearly loves the material and thought about it in depth, though the end did feel a little quick, given the number of reveals that stack on top of each other in the last ten minutes or so. Despite the presence of a few plot holes, this show is more about the feeling and experience of magic, and joining the characters on their journey, then detailed explanations on how they get out of it. There was more than one jump scare, some pretty creepy special effects and several laughs – the audience was completely caught up in the experience the company created and the combination created an unexpectedly funny, entertaining and imaginative evening.

Recommended

Reviewed by Alina C. Hevia

Presented in the Crosby Theatre space at the Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60622, April 12-27, Thursday – Saturday at 7:30 PM.

Tickets for BEYOND THE GARDEN GATE are $20.00 online at www.theimposterstheatre.com.

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