Review: The Witching Hour Offers a Fistful of Spooky Treats

The Witching Hour

Curated by Andrew Agress

Kudzu, written by Daniel Prillaman and directed by Hannah Katz

Metamorphosis, written by Blues Bland and directed by Allyson Broyles

Camping with Vlad, written by Brad White and directed by Andrew Agress

Apex Predator, written by Rachael Carnes and directed by Randall Simmons

The 5 Brendas of Murray County, written by Heather Meyer and directed by Michael Landes

Presented by Something from Abroad and FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks

94 Saint Marks Pl., Manhattan, NYC

October 24-25, 2024


October is a bit like Christmas for fans of horror and the Gothic, and FRIGID New York's annual Days of the Dead festival has a sackful of gifts on offer–even if that sack resembles the one in Audition more than the one toted by Saint Nick. The Día de Muertos-inspired festival, which runs from October 17th to November 2nd, features a range of shows themed around death and the afterlife, one of which is The Witching Hour, comprising a selection of short plays curated by Andrew Agress. In its second yearly iteration, The Witching Hour includes five works with "camp," in all its senses, as a theme and showcasing various blends of the creepy and comedic, with Agress charmingly acting as a Ghost Host between plays. Together, the plays of The Witching Hour furnish an evening of creepy fun in the lead-up to next week's celebrations of the dead (and the undead).

Playwright Daniel Prillaman's Kudzu, directed by Hannah Katz, takes place in that classic slasher location, a campground full of youthful counselors. What these counselors are encountering, though, is no cliché serial murderer in the woods, but something more uncanny: a seemingly inexplicable change in one of their charges that Parker (Theo Gabriel) doesn't even want to talk about. Libby (Julia VanTrees Cowitt) feels differently, believing, as we come to see, that one must always attempt to achieve understanding. Even though Libby is a believer at a Christian camp, she extends this conviction to an independence of thought within that framework, including toward fellow counselor Finn (Chloe Schwinghammer) and Finn's attraction to Libby. In contrast to Parker and Finn (whose fear extends to more mundane matters as well), Libby remains unfazed by the apparent spread of what's been happening to more campers, and her matter-of-factness, part of a strong performance, is unsettling even as it is perhaps the right approach to something that is terrifying (as disruptions to identity and ontology are) but also maybe the beginning of some sort of interconnected posthumanism.

Metamorphosis, written by Blues Bland and directed by Allyson Broyles, does feature a serial murderer, though with the aim of subverting expectations and overturning clichés. This particular killer (Michael Newman), who is of the strictly human variety, has captured his latest victim, a lone woman hiker (Kathleen Ormond), and has her bound to a chair when the play begins. This unnamed woman shares with Libby a certain unflappability in face of the monstrous, and, asserting early on, and ironically, that she doesn't want to play the victim, she attempts to empathize and reason her way out of her situation–or at least to a position of advantage–picking away, for example, at the claim that what he does is merely his "nature." The exchanges between the unnamed woman and the misogynistic, self-aggrandizing murderer are often very funny, though Newman can also shift instantly to menacing when required, generating a couple effective jump scares along the way, and the show's title invites us to consider questions of (individual and gendered) identity in how this all plays out.  

We return to the realm of the supernatural in Camping with Vlad, from playwright Brad White and directed by The Witching Hour's curator and Ghost Host Andrew Agress. Following a romantic betrayal, Lenny (Connor Wahrman) has gone on a camping trip with his fellow city-dwellers, the couple Eva (Maddie Conti) and Jake (Michael Landes). The play's opening finds Lenny and Eva enmeshed in an amusing argument over whether 1990s grunge or the contemporary alt-pop of Billie Eilish is superior. Bringing a different variety of angst than Nirvana or Eilish is Vlad (Theo Gabriel), who proclaims himself a vampire when the trio of campers encounter him, hilarious struggles with his own cape notwithstanding. The campers are as skeptical of the truth of Vlad's claims as they are critical of his fashion sense, but they become intrigued nonetheless by the question of whether they would take on eternal life, leading to a very funny turn by Wahrman as a Lenny who resembles a pet more than vampiric progeny and to a perfectly pitched horror-comedy ending.

In Apex Predator, written by Rachael Carnes and directed by Randall Simmons, the comedic banter between friends Bob (Alex Morrison) and Dan (Michael Newman) acts as a mask for something more sinister. Campers Bob and Dan are on a fishing trip and meet conservationist Margaret (Olivia Alicandri), and it is not long before their self-presentation as good old boys just joking around reveals a darker edge. (The fact that they see themselves as competing with predator animals is surely not a good sign.) Newman is again effective in unleashing eruptions of threatening anger, while Morrison's Bob only appears more reasonable, and Alicandri ably embodies Margaret's increasing feelings of fear and helplessness (which are arguably, as in Metamorphosis, reflective of broader patterns of gendered experience).

Bringing The Witching Hour to a close is The 5 Brendas of Murray County, written by Heather Meyer and directed by Michael Landes, a show that one might call offbeat Minnesota gothic. The 5 Brendas is the most camp of the shows in the sense in which Susan Sontag uses it, which includes an emphasis on artificiality–seen here, for instance, in the cross-gender casting of María José Roa Arévalo as only son Brendan Bakerson, a character we discover was privileged and preferred by his parents because of his gender. After talking with a local seller of cakes (Anabella Pritchard) and returning to her her only cake knife, which he has used for rather unappetizing reasons, Brendan, a census worker, comes to the house where several sisters who go by Brenda live and run a party-planning business. There is Smart Brenda (played with a great Old Hollywood patricianism by Catt Filippov), Sexy Brenda (Chloe Schwinghammer, mining the contrast between her character's lisping kittenishness, her intelligence, and the gothic circumstances of the play), Salad Brenda (a metatheatrical role hilariously inhabited by Michael Landes), and Silent Brenda (about whom we will be silent). Exposure of secrets and unearthing of family history again touch on questions of identity, here with a rather positive message and a bit of familial bonding humorously juxtaposed with some homicidal inclinations. But then, disturbing fun is what this season is all about; and The Witching Hour delivers on both counts.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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