By Dennis Polkow

June 16, 1816 remains a legendary night in literary circles. A group of writers and their friends that gathered at Villa Diodati, Switzerland—including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon after to marry Shelley), Claire Clairmont and John William Polidori—were read stories aloud by Lord Byron, after which Byron suggested that each member of the group try to write a ghost story.

Although Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont lost interest in the contest, Byron himself wrote “The Vampyre”—itself a precursor to Bram Stoker’s later “Dracula”—and Polidori wrote a now-forgotten untitled story about a skull-headed lady who was punished for peeping through a keyhole.  Meanwhile, Mary Shelley wrote one of the most famous novels of all time, “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.”

Even with Mary’s famous literary husband pushing for publication of “Frankenstein,” no conventional publisher was willing to take the risk of releasing such a shocking tale of a scientist daring to create an artificial man—only to have it turn on him—to an unsuspecting public. By the time the novel finally appeared, response was immediate and overwhelming, and it quickly became one of the biggest and best-selling books of the nineteenth century.

Nearly two hundred years later, the story continues to tantalize, to fascinate anew since now, as then, it appears that we are on the verge of major medical “advancements” based on generating life out of death or from completely synthetic means. Whether this be in the form of stem cell research that seeks to advance disease treatment from the harvest of human embryos or cloning and the ongoing trajectory that life be more efficiently and conveniently generated by non-organic means, the only shift across two centuries appears to be better technology. It’s that resonance that brings two very different versions of it to two major stages in Chicago this week. Read the rest of this entry »

John Pierson, Luke Holladay, Vanessa S. Valliere/Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

There are those who find the Neo-Futurists scary any time of the year, so the thought of the avant-garde ensemble actually setting out to be scary for the Halloween season sounded intriguing, to say the least.  As you wait for your Edgar Allan Poe-themed tour to begin, you notice, ever so subtlely, the presence of a beautiful-but-hushed-and-pale young woman sitting in a corner copiously planting herself in dirt, an upside-down take on Poe’s fear of premature burial. Old photographs surround her, some which she buries along with her, and at least one audience member has her program spirited away and buried along with the photos. A personable and playful but mysterious guide clad in a black robe and hood with a half glow-in-the-dark facemask greets our group in silence and throws a glowing red bouncing ball to see who will go first.  Entering a long, scary hallway full of Andy Warhol-like portraits of well-known dead people, we make our way to a room based on Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” where a game audience member is given a palette of real paints and a brush and invited to paint a slowly deteriorating model on a video screen. Our aesthetic host, meanwhile, judges the quality of each, crumbling up ones that the rest of us decide do not represent honest artistic efforts.  A room devoted to “The Tell-Tale Heart” has audience members reading free riffs on the tale from a deck of cards (two of us had to chime in with punctuated “thump-thump” sound effects) but to careful and heartfelt direction from our silent guide. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

At this time of the year, there are plenty of “haunted house” options for Halloween thrill seekers, most consisting of long dark hallways populated with masked marauders who seek to pop out suddenly at the most unexpected moment. Your heart pounds, you get an adrenaline rush, and then you see that, well, it’s just a guy in a cheesy mask. To quote B.B. King, “The thrill is gone.”

What separates Oracle Productions “Disturbed III” from such offerings is that it attempts to leave you with a fright that you can take home with you, something to think about. Yes, there are dark halls and even some pop-outs. But what stays with you is what you experience after the “boo!” factor. As these gifted performance artists interact with you and act their soulless little hearts out for you in cramped quarters, when the light is good enough, the makeup, special effects and costumes are convincing enough that, well, they often don’t look like theatrical trappings.

A deadpan host ushers you in and is able to look you right in the eye as he cautiously introduces various “experiments” by a resident mad doctor who seems all the more mad because he has reasonable lapses of sanity as he attempts to explain himself. And the experiments themselves, complete with glowing eyes that dart around in the dark and who beg for your help more mercilessly than the panhandlers outside the theater, really do a convincing job of making you feel as if you are encountering truly tortured, lost souls.

Oh, and did I mention that this is all preceded by a running projector showing you dissections and botched psychological surgeries of the past? By the time the whole thing has ended, you end up in a back alley where you’re not sure which was worse: going in, or coming out to savor the scares for the trip home. (Dennis Polkow)

At Oracle Theatre, 3809 North Broadway, (773)244-2980; $9, through November 1,

After two consecutive Halloween seasons of having Edgar Allan Poe haunt the Tudor Peabody Estate in west suburban Oakbrook, First Folio (formerly First Folio Shakespeare Festival) has instead invited Count Dracula over this year for the holidays.

This is the Bob Hall and David Richmond off-Broadway adaptation, meant to be sexy and funny and preceding subsequent, admittedly more biting, satirical Draculas by decades. Given the opening-night audience reaction, which was deadpan serious (myself and the critic next to me were laughing now and then, but we seemed to be the only ones doing so and, after awhile, we were even getting looks from vampire purists), there is a disconnect here, whether by accident or design.

But the work is staged and acted so seriously that the confusion is understandable: every time Dracula appears, the fog machines go into overdrive; at one point the lights go out and a glow-in-the-dark bat is hovering over the audience in true William Castle fashion; at another point, a crucifix explodes into flames, which can have other meanings, especially in the suburbs. Meanwhile, Renfield is constantly chasing flies to eat while his doctors and the hero and heroine seem to think that they’re doing the real deal but with a bewildering variety of shifting accents.

But the biggest problem is that unlike the Poe show, where there was constant interaction between cast and audience that was helped along by having various scenes staged in various rooms of the house, here, we are ushered in a side door and stay put in one room with all of the action off to one side, as if we aren’t even there. (Dennis Polkow)

At Mayslake Peabody Estate, Route 83 & 31^st Street; Oakbrook, (630)986-8067. $23-$30. Through November 2.

If only Broadway jukebox musicals were half this twisted. A cult hit from last year, “Carpenters Halloween” marries director John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher flick “Halloween” to the music of The Carpenters, replete with all the ooey goodness you’d expect from “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.” It’s a tremendous idea, and talk about your incongruities.

The creators Scott Bradley and Jonny Stax—better known as The Scooty and JoJo Show—have a serious boner for pop culture and movies, and the company has concocted some majorly funny stuff in the past year, including a transgendered “Tron” spoof called “Tran,” and a John Hughes-Molly Ringwald confection that all but slayed me. I love the aesthetic they’ve landed on, with cardboard cutout props (like something ripped from a comic book, literally) and Muppety puppets filling out some of the roles.

Can’t say things work quite as well in “Carpenters Halloween,” which isn’t fully realized conceptually. (Bradley, who stars in the Jamie Lee Curtis role, also directs.) The awkward stage dimensions at Mary’s Attic are part of the problem—any show with numerous scene changes is going to look clunky in this space. And some of it could my own deficiencies—I can’t quote “Halloween” the way I can “Sixteen Candles.” I will say this, Bill Morey’s costumes (including the goofiest pair of bell-bottom jeans ever) are bang-on-the-money. These kinds of details matter, and Scooty and JoJo get it.

The best thing going on is Bradley’s performance, and that’s been the case with all of Scooty & JoJo’s shows so far. Bradley is an expert mimic—he’s got the Jamie Lee Curtis hair flip and facial expressions down cold. Someone get this guy some Activia. (Nina Metz)

At Mary’s Attic, 5400 N. Clark, scootyjojo.com. Tues-Thurs 8p, special Friday performance on Halloween. $15. Through October 31 November 5.

RECOMMENDED

Larry Underwood might have some explaining to do if he’s caught at a traffic stop on the way to UIC’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. Not that there’s anything wrong with him. The Institute provides the locale for Local Infinities Visual Theatre’s striking new site-specific piece, “Corpus Delicti,” for which Underwood regularly transports a gelatinous cadaver. Its veins made from Swiss chard and dill, its heart a pomegranate, the cadaver provides the central focus for this meditation on human dissection. But Underwood, Meghan Strell, and songster Kennedy Greenrod have more in store for the audience than human-shaped Jell-O. If anything, the production is a little overstuffed: the sharpest bits, like the vivisection of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson,” during which Underwood isolates details from a projection using his broad-brimmed white hat, get buried somewhat under the wealth of historical detail the performers have accumulated. Like many contemporary performers, Local Infinities makes a bit of a fetish out of research and source material. The piece as a whole, though, is utterly original and strange, making full use of the various levels of the operating theater in which it takes place. Production and lighting designers Sage Reed and Marc Chevalier adapt the space beautifully to the piece’s demands. From the opening strains of Greenrod’s accordion in the darkened theater to Underwood’s final disappearance against a galactic backdrop, “Corpus Delicti” offers food for thought and a perfect ambience for Halloween. (John Beer)

University of Illinois Medical Center, Department of Neurosurgery, 912 South Wood, 312-528-0077. Fri-Sun 8pm. $8-$15. Through November 6.