REVIEW -- Amityville 1925

Seven years in the making, playwright and founder of Theatre Mysterium, Christofer Cook, brings his new play, “Amityville 1925” to the black box performance space at Columbia Music Festival Association, 914 Pulaski Street in Columbia’s Vista.

Inspired by mythology surrounding the famed house at the center of the Amityville Horror franchise, Cook’s cast enacts a tale about the Moynahan family, a real family who occupied the home in 1925. In Cook’s imagination, the Irish Catholic family of five is transplanted to Amityville, NY taking up residence at 112 Ocean Avenue, the same house that has appeared to be malevolently sneering down at us in all our scary movie-induced nightmares since the first film debuted in 1979.

In Cook’s play, the family arrives at their new home with their furnishings intact due to the kindness of Jesse Purdy, the patriarch John Moynahan’s best friend. They immediately have the home blessed in traditional Catholic fashion by the local priest Father Fitzgerald but, despite the ostensible blessings bestowed by the man of the cloth, something is awry from the start. Noises from beneath the floorboards, pops and snaps from the fireplace, toppled furniture and books flying through the air. Everything one would expect from a home we hope to be haunted.

But the Moynahan family of three adult children and parents are smarter than the average haunted household-dwellers and they use their deductive powers and Irish intellects to solve the mystery of a house that has a mind of its own.

Or do they?

Amityville 1925 is a world premiere play with exceedingly strong bones and quite a bit of meat on them, to boot. Having seen the first ever public performance of the play on its opening night of Thursday, October 21, I was engaged by where the story was going, where it took me, and impressed by the scenery along the way.

Cook has assembled an excellent cast of actors, each holding their own and contributing singularly significant pieces to the puzzle. The cast successfully performs as one expects an ensemble to do with no weak links and no characters overshadowing others.

The fourth wall having been delightfully broken from the onset as the players approach the stage via the audience, pausing on the steps of the home to acknowledge the beginning of their occupancy of the house, as well as the beginning of the play, various characters return to their conversation with the audience  throughout the performance. The convention works well as a comfortable narrative device with little to no meta-referential disruption.

As family matriarch Catherine Moynahan, Zsuzsa Manna neatly walks a narrow path of being both devoutly religious but still intellectually astute and perceptive. Her Irish accent was captivating as was that of her on-stage spouse, Frank Thompson in the role of John Moynahan.

The three Moynahan siblings, Stephanie Walker as Eileen, Katie Mixon as Marguerite, and James Nolan as Thomas, are strongly portrayed. Walker’s performance was particularly engaging, evoking comparisons with that of Samantha Sloyan’s Bev Keane on the Netflix drama Midnight Mass. Even on opening night the audience got a sense of the essence of the siblings’ unique personalities which, as the run progresses, I feel certain will acquire even more depth. James Nolan’s performance suggested a far more mature actor than I expected when I recognized his youth. As he more fully actualizes his role I would expect to see more of the youthful anger and frustration the character Thomas suggests as the play goes on.

In fact, the inference of a little more backstory for the family members as-a-whole might serve to further enrich the play. I would love to know more about the relationship between the children. While Walker’s Eileen appears naively boy crazy when she meets Father Fitzgerald, it is her (more mature or possessed?) sister who acts on those impulses later on. Why is this?

And no family with adult children under one roof get along so cordially and in such a non-confrontational manner as do the Moynahan siblings. The addition of inter-relationship awareness might add texture to the siblings’ characters. Similarly, I’d love to know some incidental history of the friendship between John Moynahan and his best friend Jesse Purdy, played devotedly by Landry Phillips.

The most challenging role of the play was that of Father Fitzgerald which Charlie Goodrich accomplished with ease. Goodrich fully possessed the variation required of his role, leading the audience to believe that Father Fitzgerald was quite the actor himself.

My only frustrations with Amityville 1925 were issues that could be avoided by two things: workshopping the play to address some of the small narrative gaps mentioned above, and the hard work of a good stage manager. As someone who appreciates the difficulty of presenting what is often a one-person production, I know well how frustrating it can be to have to put out fires when you’d rather be putting flowers in a vase to make everything pretty. A stage manager would make sure the set looked complete by finishing the painting and wallpapering so raw wood doesn’t peep through an empty grandfather clock. They would dust the lower shelves of tables at audience eye-level, replace an anachronistic plastic pesticide bottle with a glass jug marked with a skull and crossbones, and made sure the bed’s box springs couldn’t be seen on the floor.

That said, the fact that this playwright/production team put a performance of this caliber together is an unusual and quite remarkable accomplishment and they deserve high praise. The play is grounded, smart, wryly funny in unexpected places, (here’s to soda bread and rotting corpses), and thoroughly entertaining. It may, in fact, be the best thing you’ll see this Halloween season.

The next time I see it, and I really want to see it again, I hope it will be on a more professional and hospitable stage with a larger crew, a bigger budget—though Theatre Mysterium clearly did a lot with a little—and all the bells and whistles a well-conceived and soundly performed piece of theatre art like Amityville 1925 deserves.

October 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th
28th, 29th, 30th, 31st

These are Thursday - Sunday performances. 8:00 curtain, except Sundays which are 1:00 pm matinees.

General admission. Tickets are $20 per person. Go to TicketLeap.com to make reservations.

REVIEW: Workshop Theatre Welcomes Audiences Back with New Work - The Campaign, written and directed by Crystal Aldamuy

In Shakespeare’s day, Elizabethans went not to see a play, but rather to ‘hear’ a play.  If the mark of a listenable story is its strength of dialogue, Crystal Aldamuy has the gift of gab. She puts words into her characters’ mouths that make us feel as though we are eavesdropping through a tenement wall. This is more than evident in her latest feat of derring do, a two-act relationship drama called The Campaign produced by Workshop Theatre. Not only does Aldamuy exhibit an acumen for how people talk, but she also proves a competent craftsperson in the construction of plot.

The Campaign tells the story of Kyle McMillian, an ambitious thirty-something who embarks on entering a local city council race, and his life with his flamboyant partner, Seth Williams. The two young men grapple with the universal vagaries of keeping their love alive while cohabitating in somewhat claustrophobic quarters. Their relationship is further challenged by Kyle’s meddling mom, Naomi, whose raison d’etre appears early on to be shopping for her son and picking out just the right sofa pillows.  

At the outset, Kyle and Seth present as a familiar trope of ‘gay odd couple.’ Kyle’s reticence is juxtaposed by Seth’s inability to keep anything to himself. When the moment arrives for Kyle to announce that he has thrown his hat in the ring to be a local politician, Seth has become disillusioned by the reality of their relationship. Seth now must compete for Kyle’s attention and must ‘campaign’ for his true loyalty. This conflict reaches a fever pitch when a man named Timothy enters the picture later in the game.   

Aldamuy’s two main characters’ wants and drives become clearer as the play progresses. Though the inclusion of Kyle’s mother, Naomi, appears first as a single-dimensional plot device, her development of personae is enriched by a touching scene wherein she connects for the first time with Seth at the kitchen table. No spoilers here, though.

Josh Kern as the earnest Kyle McMillion, son of the apparently legendary politician, Walter McMillion, is excellent. He moves throughout the play with ease, giving us a protagonist who desires far more than simply being a domestic AC repairman.

Julian Deleon sparkles with quick one-liners and hilarious mood swings. Deleon may well be the audience favorite as he maintains a type-A drama queen personality who is culinarily challenged and suffers panic attacks during failed attempts at assembling Ikea shelves.

Tiffany Dinsmore is delightful as Naomi McMillion, a mother who strives to insert herself into her son’s life and relationship with the best of intentions. Dinsmore is believable and never over-plays her hand in a role that could so easily have become a caricature.

As a playwright, Aldamuy delivers and gives us some firm bones.  

Missing, however, are clear and smooth transitions between scenes that could better convey the passage of time. These moments, when actors enter and exit depositing and retrieving props in half-light, were confusing.

Act One seemed to take a while before any significant conflict gave its characters the impetus for action. It might also have been technically stronger had Aldamuy directed Josh Kern to vocally project more as he was difficult to hear at times, keeping us on the edge of our seats for the wrong reasons. This took nothing away, however, from Kern’s powerful exchange with Deleon at the end of Act II, two scenes back-to-back that were worth the price of admission alone.

The script struggled to present a narrative that is socially relevant in 2021 with scenes about condoms and AIDS prevention (though certainly still a part of world we live in) giving us tired theatrical territory, once an important innovation in the eighties by dramatists such as Larry Kramer and William Hoffman, but by now a trope with which audiences are overly familiar.

Challenges aside, however, The Campaign is well-worth your time. Workshop Theatre has another winner here with local stalwarts Aldamuy, Kern, Deleon, and Dinsmore at the helm. Remaining performances are few. Do not miss this one!

Fri, Oct 8 8 PM, Sat, Oct 9 8 PM, Sun, Oct 10 3 PM

Tickets at Workshoptheatre.com

 

Christofer Cook is an active member of the Dramatists Guild of America. He holds an MFA, an MA, and a BA. An internationally produced and award-winning playwright, his latest work is “Amityville, 1925” which opens at Theatre Mysterium on October 21st.

REVIEW: Kirk Hammett's It's Alive! at Columbia Museum of Art - by Christofer Cook

Hammett’s Panoply of Genre Treasures a Delightful Submersion into the Dark Fantastic

Merchant of menace, Vincent Price, once opined; “I trust people who are violent about art as long as they aren’t closed-minded. But, unfortunately, most art blowhards are also art bigots”. Price’s position on such observers suggests that the art world is forever infested with subjective perspectives on its ever-changing product. These so-called critics do nothing but praise that which they like and denigrate that which they find distasteful, gauche, sophomoric. But the real challenge is to seek the beauty, skillful craftsmanship, and precision within a work whose subject matter may very well be anathema to the beholding eye.

Thankfully, horror aficionados remain undaunted by their naysayers. These bastions of blood become impervious to criticism and continue to amass works of art that represent the absolute best of the macabre and the fantastique. Perhaps no one exemplifies these purveyors of genre art more so than Kirk Hammett, lead guitarist of those meisters of metal, Metallica. Hammett’s collection of horror and sci-fi movie props, costumes, and memorabilia has gradually and insidiously taken over his San Francisco home like the creeping crud in George Romero’s The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verill, based on Stephen King’s Weeds. In Hammett’s case, though, his growing horde is not an organic pestilence, rather it is a miscellany of fine objects d’arte.

An exhibit of Hammett’s select acquisitions can be viewed through May 17th at the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina. It is an adventure through a portal of spellbinding wonder the moment one steps inside. We are first impacted by an immediate blast of visual splendor. Just beyond the gallery’s glass doors, welcoming us to the experience, is a mammoth title card in rich, vivid colors. It is the identical illustration that graces the cover of Hammett’s latest book by the same name; IT’S ALIVE! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Posters from the Kirk Hammett collection.

The image is a nostalgic throwback to the pre-code era of the comic book covers of yesteryear. These dog-eared horrors in four colors were often secreted between the mattress covers of millions of American acne-ridden kids we now affectionately refer to as “monster kids”. The gargantuan signage prepares us for the terrors adorning the gallery walls beyond—an antediluvian cemetery features from end to end. In the foreground, an undead arm bathed in crimson light breaks through its terrestrial bonds. Worms crawl, wriggling about the extremity. In a show of rebellion that only a zombie could display, the hand brandishes the ubiquitous devil-horned symbol denoting rock-n-roll, metal mayhem, and all things dark and dangerous.

The sideshow-like mural is an effective precursor to the devilishly delightful designs to come. As one rounds the right corner into the gallery, stunning vintage posters hang in reverence to the by-gone age of German expressionism; Wiene’s 1920 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Gade and Schall’s 1921 Hamlet,  Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, and Lang’s 1927 Metropolis. The process most commonly used to create these works of visual wonderment was stone lithography. Color was limited, the form was time-consuming and expensive. Few have survived. Hammett’s relics, however, those extant to us today, remain unphased by time or the elements.

The exhibit continues in a celebration of the advent of atomic energy, film noir, and drive-in picture shows. Our eyes are immediately drawn to the center of one salon wherein what appears to be an industrial-sized, copper-rust electric powered insulator from the set of James Whale’s 1931 fright feature, Frankenstein. It is breathtaking to behold and fits in perfectly with the surrounding lithoes.

Nearby is a glass case featuring a small selection of lobby cards. These were smaller photos on thicker stock that were used to dress the lobbies of cinemas. These lobby cards are mana to collectors and while there are still plenty out there in abundance, they are increasing in value as supply in the market begins a slow descent. They have been beautifully preserved and many of the images shown are actual screenshots from the films they promote.

The philosophy being, that if audiences were unsure of what creature feature to take in next, they would be inspired by the colorful action shots they were guaranteed to see on the big screen. No pretentious posing in the photos, what you saw was what you’d get. The lobby cards were also less expensive for Hollywood promotion houses to print and duplicate. Hammett’s are a joy to take in and are in the finest of condition.

No collection would be complete of course without a heaping helping of Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaney. Classic one-sheets from Hollywood’s golden age of horror cinema and into the 1940s are well-represented; Browning’s 1931 Dracula, Freund’s 1932 The Mummy, Waggner’s 1941 The Wolfman, and Arnold’s 1954 The Creature from the Black Lagoon all framed with care, stare back at us in monstrous malevolence. Featured in the show are two beautifully commissioned life-sized figures; Boris Karloff from Ulmer’s 1934 The Black Cat, and Bela Lugosi from Halperin’s 1932 White Zombie.

Hammett’s sheets from the 1950s reflect much of our fears and trepidations of the decade’s technological innovations; Korean War weaponry, hydrogen bombs, nuclear attacks, and the launch of the Soviet “Sputnik,” an innovation that effectively began the space race.

It was also about this time that the process of creating these advertising marvels moved from stone lithography to offset printing. Hammett himself has observed that a comparison of poster designs from the ‘20s and ‘30s and those of the ‘40s and ‘50s are as disparate in design concept as they are in topic. Whereas the earlier one-sheets exhibited a wide array of artisans, techniques, styles, and palettes, the later years conveyed a style more formulaic.

When atomic age epics such as Haskin’s 1953  War of the Worlds filled the silver screen during Saturday afternoon matinees, the cinemas were plastered with depictions of sci-fi scenes to assault the senses; damsels fleeing in fear, Martians invading rural America, interplanetary battles, infernal machines, and giant warships from outer space destroying everything in their path with death rays.

Hammett has these carefully protected artifacts in seeming perpetuity. His assessment is true. If one lines the posters up side by side it is possible to see the beginnings of the ‘floating heads’ phenomenon so rampant in our present-day distilled culture of quick, cheap, and fast photo-shop. The fonts used for titles are similar, almost identical in many cases, and the colors, a revolving palate of red, yellow, green, and black.

A few pieces are suspended in the glow of track lighting giving respect to the later films of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Polanski’s 1968 Rosemary’s Baby, Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist, and Scott’s 1979 Alien bring Hammett’s collection to a chronological stopping point at the twentieth century. For metal enthusiasts, a selection of Hammett’s monster-laden guitars are on display as well.

Though overall, the It’s Alive! experience is an excellently curated and crafted showcase of genre treasures, it is not without its challenges. This particular art show is theatrical in nature and would have benefitted from a few effects that would have enhanced the observer experience. Conspicuously glaring was the white-hot track lighting in the galleries. Though it is a common and standard approach to display (after all this is a visual artform), such bright light hitting the sheets, props, and costumes betrayed the genre. A dimmer setting of vintage incandescence might have provided an atmosphere more befitting the gothic milieu.

Absent from the experience was the use of low underscoring throughout the museum. Instrumental soundtracks and/or orchestrated music of the Wagnerian catalog would have set the mood at a higher level of stimulus. As it is, the absolute silence does nothing to benefit the tour. One oversight appeared to be an original standee promoting Cooper and Schoedsack’s 1933 King Kong. The cut-out is placed too close to a wall so as not to give the observing eye the benefit of depth and dimension. To pull it out from the back wall even a couple of feet would have made a marked difference in the illustration of Kong’s glory.

In the end, Hammett’s collected works are a stunning visual representation of a long ago time, in darkened cinemas, where the crunching of popcorn, the sipping of sweet cola and the screaming of teenagers at mutant, malformed Martians up on the big screen was as splendid a Saturday afternoon as one could imagine.

Christofer Cook holds an MFA, an MA, and a BA. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, The Dracula Society, and the Dramatists Guild of America. His latest plays are Amityville, An Edgar Allan Poe Christmas Carol, and a stage adaptation of House on Haunted Hill. His published script, Dracula of Transylvania (Advised by Dacre Stoker), is the first theatrical treatment of the novel written in collaboration with a member of the Stoker family since the 1920’s when Bela Lugosi played the title role on Broadway. It is currently available at the Columbia Museum of Art’s gift shop.