REVIEW: A question of blood

In recent years genre productions have shed some of the stereotypes of the past. Audiences have come to realize that sci-fi, fantasy, Westerns and even horror can achieve just as high a level of storytelling and creativity as any of their more “respectable” counterparts. That’s all laudable, but when it comes to horror, sometimes you just want to see some gore. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the daunting elements facing the Twin Cities Horror Festival is how to get as graphic as scary stories sometimes demand within the physical limitations of a live stage performance. In this year’s festival I’ve noticed three distinctly different approaches, each of which has something to recommend it. Method 1: Don’t show anything If you want to get technical, The Surgeon is the goriest show in this year’s festival. It’s the story of a gifted surgeon who gets pulled into a grotesque world of lies, sexual fetishes and questionable amputations by an alluring former colleague. Limbs get severed, hands get smashed and knives are wielded with reckless abandon. If this was a movie it would be a smorgasbord for lovers of torture porn and gore alike. But of course this isn’t a movie, so Hardcover Theater takes the surprisingly effective tack of communicating all the mayhem via pantomime and a Greek chorus explaining the viscera in lovingly grim detail. It’s somehow almost as unsettling to watch an actor repeatedly whack his own hand with a make-believe hammer as it would be to see the mutilation play out as a special effects set piece. Likewise, the chorus’s minute description of the color and texture of a strip of necrotic flesh is a difficult thing to sit through. The Surgeon might not be the most graphic play at TCHF, but it’s probably the queasiest. As for the show itself, it’s a fun if not entirely novel exercise in nastiness. Of all the shows I’ve seen in this year’s Horror Fest, it’s the one that plays most like a straightforward B-horror movie, right down to the mad doctor cackling as an insane plan comes to life. It’s not without its moments of humor, but thankfully it steers just clear of camp for a satisfying dip into ugliness. Method 2: Show it with style Gorilla Sandwich’s Gentlemen, I Have Reason to Believe One of Us is the Thing is described as “a parlor farce adaptation of John Carpenter’s The Thing," which is a curious enough concept that you might expect gore to take a backseat to gags. That’s true for the most part, but there’s still an abundance of blood and guts in this show. It’s just that they’re an adorable sort of blood and guts. Gorilla Sandwich makes it clear up front that realism is not what they’re striving for. Fred Beukema, Joe Bozic and Nels Lennes’s script replaces Carpenter’s scientific expedition with an assemblage of early 20th century luminaries ranging from Annie Oakley to the Wright Brothers to Rasputin, all of whom have been called together by Ernest Shackleton to identify what appears to be the corpse of some unearthly creature. Almost from the start, the stage is filled with fake beards, outlandish get-ups and one homely bit of creature design. As the story progresses and the notables start getting picked off one by one, bad monster masks and charmingly handmade puppets begin to enter the picture, as well as a fair bit of gore. In the world of Gentlemen, that constitutes black-clad performers darting on stage to adorn the actors with fluttering streamers of blood-red felt. It’s a goofy effect no matter how you look at it, but it’s in keeping with the shaggy spirit of a monster movie adaptation populated by a team of improv comedy specialists. Also in keeping with the improv spirit, it’s something of an uneven, unpolished production. The jokes come at a rapid clip and not all of them find their mark. In a large cast of outsized characters, some of them are bound to get lost in the shuffle. Of those that don’t, Levi Weinhagen’s exuberantly hammy Harry Houdini and Fred Beukema’s inscrutable Rasputin get the meatiest parts and make the biggest impressions. The whole thing feels as though it could have used a little more room – or, more likely, time – to breathe, but it achieves its modest ends of being an amiable, frenetic and abidingly weird take on a horror classic. Method 3: Show everything With last year’s Hear No Evil, RawRedMeat set the bar for what a modestly budgeted local theater piece could accomplish in the field of blood and gore. The expectations for this year’s Frankenstein were accordingly high, and the company responded by not just raising the stakes but planting them in entirely unexpected locales. Whereas Hear No Evil was a fairly straightforward – though exceptionally artful – supernatural thriller, Tyler Olsen’s Frankenstein script and direction border on the abstract. Narratives and timelines pick up and fade away, only to crop up again in unexpected moments. It’s often unclear which character a given actor is playing, or what relation that character has to all the others. Mary Shelley’s novel gets referenced heavily, but what monsters we see bear little resemblance to hers and even less to James Whale’s. It’s an intentionally disorienting approach that keeps the audience immersed in a nightmare state of constant, ineffable tension. And then there’s the gore. Mouths bubble over with blood. Humans are torn apart by hand and by tool. Sacks of flesh fall from the sky. Bodies emerge writhing from trash bags and almost everyone is covered in blood from the early going. The violence is as intense and unpredictable as the narrative, and the two feed off each other throughout. As in Shelley’s novel, young Victor Frankenstein is the hero and the villain of his own story – several of them, in fact – and the architect of both new life and his own destruction. Death permeates the stage from the play’s first minute but it’s never clear how permanent or purposeful its sting is. This is a Frankenstein of endless ideas and energy. It’s not much like anything you’re likely to see on stage at the Horror Festival or anywhere else. And of course, it gives great gore.