Review: Everyone Clasp Hands for "Ectoplasm"

Ectoplasm

Written and directed by Sara Fellini

Presented by spit&vigor at spit&vigor tiny baby blackbox theatre

115 MacDougal Street - 3C. Manhattan, NYC

September 24-October 31, 2026

L to R, facing forward: Jesse Metz, Sara Fellini, Fedrico Mosttert. Photo by Giancarlo Osaben.

In his book Haunted Media (Duke UP, 2000), Jeffrey Sconce observes that "the Spiritualist movement provided one of the first and most important forums for women's voices to enter the public sphere," which of course rapidly made it "a target of attack by the male-dominated paradigm of 'scientific rationalism'" (p. 12). Spiritualism's intersections with reformist politics, including women's suffrage, doubtless did little to mitigate such attacks. Sconce also notes that Spiritualism, which took hold in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and involved contacting the dead at séances led by mediums who were most often women, was from the first bound up with emerging electrical technologies such as the telegraph that seemed to defy "time and space" (p. 12). These very tensions around gender and technology, as well as some connected to class mobility, run through Sara Fellini's Ectoplasm, set at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Returning to the stage in a revised form after a well-received 2022 debut run, Ectoplasm unfolds over the course of an eventful séance performed by one Sara Béraud Conlan (superbly played by Fellini, who also directs), who must deal not only with skeptical, sometimes predatory, male strangers but also with doubts from her husband–and even herself.

Sara Fellini and Steve Gamble. Photo by Giancarlo Osaben.

Before the audience meets Sara, there first transpires a short scene of two young women having a chance conversation with a man via a wireless radio–a new technology "that possessed the power to atomize and disperse both body and consciousness across the vast expanses of the universe," as Sconce describes it (p.14). Indeed, the girls ask the man if he is "a ghost," and the belief that electronic audio devices have some special ability to capture ghostly voices remains alive and well today, as witnessed by any number of horror films and ghost-hunting shows. The same is true of electrical lights, the flickering or failure of which is a sure sign in popular media of ghostly activity, likely because of electricity's early association with life force (think of Shelley's Frankenstein) and the imagining of "flows of electricity, consciousness, and information to be homologous, interchangeable, and transmutable" (Sconce, p. 8). The home of the eccentric Madame Francine Montfort (Laurel Creighton), who has contracted Sara and her husband, Kal (Steve Gamble) for an evening’s entertainment, boasts newfangled electric lighting, which necessitates a small placard warning not to try using matches on the push button switch and prompts some affronted reactions to their brightness that would be hard for most to imagine today. Madame Montfort has invited a small number of guests to her séance: Ira Orinthall (Fedrico Mosttert), like Harry Houdini, is a professional magician with a sideline in exposing fraudulent mediums. George Crookes (Jesse Metz) is a parapsychologist–a representative of male-dominated scientific rationalism like Ira, but with an added enthusiasm for sexual harassment. George's wife, Mizka (Yurika Ohno), is an heiress who immigrated from Japan, along with her sister, Annette Itō (Azumi Tsutsui), now a dedicated suffragist, when they were adolescents and identifies as a "Blood Ritualist." Madame Montfort also introduces a different sort of 'guest': a skull that she gives to Sara and Kal before the séance begins, telling them that is the skull of her uncle, Arctic explorer Elisha Kane (Adam Belvo, bringing both fantastic intensity and tenderness to the role), though she goes on to identify it as different people at different points (Kane [1820-1857] was a real-life explorer and, historically, had a romantic involvement with one of the most well-known female mediums of his time). Significantly, when Kal anoints the skull as part of the séance, he does so first in the name of the Christian Holy Trinity, an all-male grouping, and then in the name of the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. What follows is both an escalation of the private readings earlier given, separately, to Ira and the sisters by Sara and ironically throws Sara herself into the position of skeptic.

Yurika Ohno and Azumi Tsutsui. Photo by Giancarlo Osaben.

Also present at the gathering is Madame Montfort's butler Callum Holes (George Walsh), whom Sara and Kal knew before Callum moved "up in the world," as Kal puts it. Sara herself, before she and Kal began making a living conducting private and public séances, was a kitchen maid. Historically, Spiritualists were primarily middle and upper class, and Sara's working-class past perhaps feeds into her desire not to be a "crass" performer, even as she accepts dressing up what she avows is her real power to speak to the dead–a power that is the result of a violent if unpremeditated act–with the same sort of tricks that fraudulent mediums use. Kal admits that he has no such power, and, early in the play, expresses a desire to discontinue this line of work. His disinclination connects to Sara's struggles to be both believed and valued, as well as to a debate between Sara and Kal about the ethics of mediumship, with its potential to exploit grief (a debate that, like the beliefs around ghosts and electricity, extends to this day). Part of their debate uses acting–lies producing real emotion–as an analogy for mediumship, an especially apt metacommentary for a show that takes advantage of the very intimate dimensions of spit&vigor's tiny baby blackbox theatre to immersively embed its audience in the action. Spectators, addressed as spirits by Callum in a prologue, are seated around the perimeter of the faux wood-paneled room on chairs upholstered in red velvet, creating the sense that they are voyeuristic visitors to Madame Montfort's parlour (adding to these meta echoes, Sara admits to a voyeuristic streak herself). The production also takes advantage of the small space with some subtle ghostly effects at a couple of points and a fantastic–one might say lights-out–finale.

L to R: Fedrico Mosttert, Adam Belvo, George Walsh, and Laurel Creighton. Photo by Giancarlo Osaben.

In our role as spectral spectators, we get to spy on an excellent ensemble cast. Walsh's Callum is dryly funny, matched by Ohno when, for example, Mizka gleefully whips out her dagger. Tsutsui's self-confident Annette provides a contrast to and perhaps a model for Sara, and Creighton's Madame Montfort offers yet another, much more sensual, image of empowered womanhood though, much like Mosttert's obtrusively assured Ira, her self-possession conceals a shaky foundation of trauma and uncertainty. Metz gives George the perfect amount of brash sleaziness and entitlement, while Fellini and Gamble sketch a much better marriage than George's in the flirtatious affection that they layer into Kal and Sara's interactions, even when they become heated. If one theme of Ectoplasm is change–in technology, in women's place in the public sphere, in relationships, and so on–another that emerges concerns appreciating life, even with its losses and pain, and love while we can, while we're still on the animate side of the spiritual telegraph. If you only attend one séance in this life, make it Ectoplasm.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards