The first thing you notice is how small the set is.
In a 50-seat black box theater tucked into a space on the east side of Austin, Texas, the Bottle Alley Theatre Company has constructed an eight-foot by ten-foot rectangle, into which they’ve placed a clawfoot bathtub, a sink, and a toilet. And over the next two weekends, four, and sometimes five, actors will pack into that space to breathe new life into a single-location indie horror treasure, live on stage.
The story, We Need to Do Something, emerged as a novella by Texas author Max Booth III in the spring of 2020, the perfect time for a narrative about a family crammed uncomfortably into a small space. That same year, the film adaptation, written by Booth and directed by Sean King O’Grady, emerged on the festival circuit and eventually hit streaming. Since then, this bleak, harrowing story has continued to win fans, including Bottle Alley’s creative director and producer, Amber Wilson.
“I’d read the We Need to Do Something novella, was super excited when it was adapted into a film, rented it right away on streaming,” Wilson told Dread Central after a recent rehearsal. “I’m just watching it and I’m just thinking, ‘This is one location, and why can’t this be a play?’ I just thought to myself, ‘This story is so fucked up, but it’s also funny. There are so many themes in this that feel totally applicable, especially in this year’s environment.’ I got really excited.”
Things got more exciting when Wilson, thinking she had nothing to lose, reached out to Booth on Instagram and asked if they’d be interested in adapting their best-known work to date for the stage. To her surprise, Booth was immediately receptive.
“I don’t think they realized I lived so close,” Booth said from their home in San Antonio. “That was a pleasant surprise for them. During the negotiations with the contract and stuff, they agreed to let me write it as well. That wasn’t always the plan. I don’t know what the plan was, but I brought up the fact that I would be willing to write the stage play, and they were excited about that.”
Booth—who is the co-founder, publisher, and editor of Ghoulish Books, an indie horror publishing house that also runs a physical store in San Antonio—has written numerous indie horror novels and novellas over their career. But We Need to Do Something‘s film adaptation has made it their best-known horror tale thus far. Originally conceived as a screenplay, Booth rewrote it as a novella before producers approached them with the idea of a film adaptation. Now, after becoming simultaneously author and screenwriter for We Need to Do Something, they can add playwright as well.
“I’ve read a lot of stage plays just because I’m a fan of the whole bottle episode aspect of that stuff,” Booth said. “A lot of my writing lends itself to stage plays, I think, just because I love writing limited settings and limited casts, and I think it goes well with that.”
Like its novella and screenplay companions, the stage play of We Need to Do Something follows a family of four—mother Diane (Emily Green), father Robert (John Gholson), daughter Melissa (Kaylynn Yarelle), and son Bobby (Andrew Solis)—who pack into the family bathroom during a storm warning. When a tree falls in front of the bathroom door, pinning them inside, the family must try to hold out for help even as they fight to escape. But for Melissa, who recently dabbled in witchcraft with her girlfriend Amy (Sadie Okerstrom), the storm feels like a very unnatural disaster. She starts to worry if her attempts at magic rituals might have caused her family’s newly apocalyptic conditions.
In adapting the work for the stage, Booth was focused on a few details that would line the play up with the novella in ways the film didn’t achieve. For one thing, they wanted the bathroom to be smaller, less like the palatial spread of the film that allowed for many different camera positions. For another, they wanted flashbacks to Melissa’s time with Amy to function more like cursed memories, all contained within the bathroom. That means that everything you’ll see during a performance is contained inside the 8-by-10 rectangle, including moments with Amy, who creeps in through a hidden passage to perform alongside Melissa.
To pull it all off, Booth and Wilson collaborated with director Sarah Hogestyn, a Bottle Alley company member who was also an early fan of We Need to Do Something.
“The blessing of this show being in such a small space is also one of its greater challenges, because this is a family of four and this is a very small bathroom,” Hogestyn said. “We had a great fight choreographer, Matthew Weedman, who worked with us a lot on getting all of that violence and the fighting. This is a pretty violent show, so getting all of that to happen in this small space safely was both a challenge and also really fun. There was a lot of creative problem-solving that went on to make this happen.”
Creative problem-solving came naturally to Hogestyn and to Wilson, who has a background in designing practical effects. Even in its claustrophobic environment, We Need to Do Something is a show that requires copious amounts of blood, creatures, and strange events all contained in a bathroom, so many that you’ll be wondering how it all fits in that small space.
But watching We Need to Do Something, even in rehearsals, it doesn’t feel like you’re peering into a small, isolated world separate from your own. In the black box theater, with the tiny bathroom at the center, it feels immersive, immediate, and visceral, revealing the power of horror in live theater in ways both Wilson and Hogestyn look forward to unleashing on the public.
“It’s a different experience, I think, to be an observer in the audience’s quiet space because I think it really pulls you in,” Wilson said. “There’s no pause button. You do get this intermission, which we’ve timed out incredibly well with bringing the tension to a breaking point. I truly think that people are going to have such a unique and terrifying experience just being the observer of watching this family, I would not even say slowly, I would say very rapidly, deteriorate within this space.”
Hogestyn added, “Especially this show, when it starts off, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get to the point that it does. That false sense of security is something that I love in horror plays where they start normal, and then it gets slowly, and slowly, and then more rapidly worse and more horrifying. By the end, it’s just this horrible scene in front of you. I love that. It’s like a runaway train. You’re sitting there, and more and more is happening, and all you can do is watch. You can’t go interact with it, you can’t stop it. You just have to watch it happen.”
For Booth, who’s now lived with this story for more than five years, watching We Need to Do Something come to life onstage is a reminder of why they wanted to write it in the first place, and why it seems to endure among their readers.
“My favorite thing about it is not even the premise of being stuck in a bathroom, although I think that’s just a really funny premise,” Booth said. “It always will be a funny premise to me. I love the whole teenage lesbians trying to be witches and just fucking it up so bad. I just love people trying to do occult stuff and just not knowing enough about it, and then what the consequences might be of making a mistake. I think that’s a lot of fun.”
We Need to Do Something will be performed at CRASHBOX in Austin, on August 29-31 and September 5-7, with each performance starting at 8 PM. For more information and to get tickets, visit the Bottle Alley Theatre Company’s website.
https://ift.tt/WTrlp0m https://ift.tt/Fwoue5C
No comments:
Post a Comment