Next weekend, the students in the Vashon High School drama program are going to enter a darkened stage and proceed to give you the creeps.
This may surprise you, in more ways than one. High school plays, typically, are built on uplift and delight, or a sense of noble purpose. You bring the whole family, including the young ones, because everyone will feel at ease.
Yet our production of “A Spirited Manor,” a modern Victorian-style horror play by Seattle author Kate Danley, is meant to provoke unease, at least in places. The stage goes dark and threatening spirits pop into life in unexpected places. People are found most gruesomely dead. In short, please don’t bring the whole family.
Why? Why exclude some of our audience? And why do so at a time when the daily news provides us with fresh horrors of a very real and upsetting sort?
As the one who chose this play and has directed it, let me provide a few answers.
First of all, horror is part of the vocabulary of current popular culture. The students of Vashon High School are likely to have watched “American Horror Story,” “Black Mirror” or “Penny Dreadful” or any number of other stylized horror shows.
Lest we lapse into “kids these days,” let me bring up Sophocles’ work which, at a sprightly 2,600-year-old, features no end of eye gougings and terrified wailings and live burials. Consider the areas of Shakespeare’s canon, such as “Titus Andronicus” and “King Lear,” that hide none of the byproducts of violence and madness. To rewrite Lady Macbeth: Who would have thought the classics to have so much blood in them?
Given my description, you may be a bit relieved to know how little blood and agony there really is in “A Spirited Manor.” It’s a romp with chills in it, in the manner of the Victorian penny dreadfuls — cheaply published horror stories— that author Kate Danley used as a model.
But still: Why horror at all? Why not just a romp? I believe that we use stories, at least sometimes, to touch the darker experiences of life in a safe way. We cannot live sanely without acknowledging that horrors happen, that nightmares might come true, and that even lightness throws shadows into our lives. Something in our psyches wants to deal with all these truths in full, and theater gives us the means to do that.
Our story follows a young widow who has to pick up the pieces of her life, even as those pieces grow sharper and more confusing. She is haunted, literally, by the spirit of a young girl. She goes, reluctantly, to a seance in search of answers.
Our cast is walking with excitement across the boundaries of the lighthearted and the heavy. Their decisions are guiding this production into territory that may be a bit unknown to all of us.
Speaking of decisions, here is the final reason for taking on a horror play: The students encouraged me to do so. Many of them loved the idea of staging something scary, and I say, let’s follow their intuition where it may lead us.
See you (but probably not your young children) at Vashon High School Theater.
“A Spirited Manor” will be performed only at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, June 3 and 4, and 1 p.m. Sunday, June 5. Previously announced performance dates of Friday and Saturday, May 27 and 28 were canceled after the print edition of The Beachcomber went to press. A subsequently announced preview performance, at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, May 29, has also been canceled.
Tickets to performances on June 3, 4, and 5 at $10 at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
All audience members are asked to wear masks at the performances.
Andy James is the theater teacher at Vashon High School, and the director of “A Spirited Manor.”
Correction: This article has been revised since it was published in the May 26 print edition of The Beachcomber, to reflect that the Vashon High School production of “A Spirited Manor” will be performed only at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, June 3 and 4, and 1 p.m. Sunday, June 5. Previously announced performance dates of Friday and Saturday, May 27, 28, and 29 were canceled after the newspaper went to press.
