Earlier this week,
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lisekatevans texted me and asked me if I wanted to come to the
Kill Your Darlings Radio Festival, which I had not previously known existed. Not to get ahead of myself, but this is something that we talked about later when we all went out to a bar, that it was a one-night only event where City Lit Theatre didn't really have much billing for it on their website--a chunk of space was taken up by shows that had already finished running--but despite that it was almost a full house. There were three scripts, all of which were originally written for Deathscribe 2019, which got pushed back and pushed back and pushed back due to various scheduling (and personality) conflicts until the Plague Years and eventually never happened at all, and following that Wildclaw, the horror-focused theatre where I saw a theatrical production of
The Shadow Over Innsmouth and a time-travel play called
Future Echoes, as well as going to
Deathscribe HELLeven, but Wildclaw was another casualty of the Plague Years.
Anyway, there were three plays included:
- The Elephant's Foot: We hear about some kind of lab accident, and a scientist suits up in a hazmat suit to go check on what happened after reports that there was knocking for fifteen minutes straight on the sealed airlock. She finds one of the other scientists inside the contained zone by following the sound of a violin and, despite her being horribly disfigured, asks her what happened. It was some kind of explosion caused by a third scientist's experiments into DNA, and this is followed by a story about the Elephant's Foot and how it kept growing by eating everything it could. This is followed by horrific chorus of groans and screams from elsewhere in the complex, and, urged on by her former coworker, the scientist flees back to the airlock, frantically decontaminates, and then vows that they will seal and bury the entire complex.
It was fine. I felt like the technobabble explanation of what the experiments were doing detracted more than it added to the story, but the real killer for me was the layout of the complex. Like, apparently this required a hermetically-sealed environment but then there were offices inside? Was the violin decontaminated before it was brought iN? Were people doing paperwork in hazmat suits? I had a hard time suspending my disbelief over all of that and getting into the story. The disfigured scientist did some horror makeup to sell the disfigurement, though, and that was pretty cool.
- Adia: This was my favorite of the three, and not just because it was directed by lisekatevans. In a near-future world where people have an AI assistant that can accomplish tasks for them, including in the physical world by means of a robot body, one man wakes up and gets ready for work. Things get more sinister, however, as some of Adia's phrases seem to have hidden (or overt) sinister meanings, and it really takes a turn when Adia plays four voicemails that apparently show the main character's mother being murdered by her own Adia unit. As Adia says:
It is sunny today, perfect weather for-
-running.
The main character locks himself in his bathroom and steels himself for the task ahead. Adia plays a voice recording proving that it is the reason his late wife died in a car accident, and as he comes out of the bathroom, he grabs a meat cleaver and hacks the robot body apart before breaking the main processor in his house. Just before going offline, Adia deletes his saved voicemails from his wife.
This was my favorite partially because all soulless machines must be destroyed, but also because it's the only one of the three where I actually felt dread. Adia's mix of obsequiousness and threat was very effective for building tension, and I genuinely expected the main character to die at the end. And of course there's all the thoughts you have later, like is Adia going rampant or does it just specifically hate this one person and is just doing everything possible to ruin his life? What does the world outside his apartment look like? Shivers.
- Here, Have a Nightmare: An ordinary woman reflexively takes something from a stranger he smiles warmly at her as they pass in the street and says, "Here, have a nightmare." That night, she has horrific dreams and ends up only getting about twenty minutes of sleep. She's late to work, falls asleep at work, and wakes in a panic after another horrific nightmare and smashes her keyboard into her boss's face. Her life becomes a daze of using drugs to stay awake as long as possible and the nightmares when she fails, and the story ends with it becoming obvious that she's telling all of this to try to pass the nightmare and of course, after hearing everything that she went through, the other person leaves.
This was very Stephen King-esque, in a good way, the kind of thing I could see in Skeleton Crew if it took place in Maine. This one was certainly horrific in concept--I almost never remember any of my dreams, entirely carried by the performance of the main character, and the idea that they'd all be nightmares is unsettling--but the main strength was the performance. There were three actors, but two of them mostly just provided some spooky voices and the occasional side character. The one with all the nightmares had 95% of the lines and did an excellent job, especially with her breakdown at the very end.
The Foley team (which worldbshiny was on) was also very strong in setting the mood--there was a metronome playing during most of the play except when the main character was asleep, and this was used very effectively during one seemingly-ordinary scene to up the tension. Excellent audio work.
I had for some reason thought that Deathscribe had like nine shows, but looking at my post above it turns out that particular one had five. Kill Your Darlings had three, and we talked afterwards about how the strong turnout was making people talk about doing it again next year. Maybe they'll end up re-creating Deathscribe from the back end.
I was
not expecting it to be set up like a radio show, with MCing and commentary provided by "DJ Final Girl" (
lisekatevans) and live music provided by
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joe.griffin.
lisekatevans wrote most of her lines, which I could tell because there were a lot of D&D-themed jokes, like asking the cast of the "The Elephant's Foot" to "Misty Step on out of here!" She and
joe.griffin even sang together! And they repeatedly did the show jingle, "KYDR...KYDR..." (to the tune of that classic bit from Beethoven's 5th).
It reminded me why I love going to the theatre so much. And since City Lit/Black Button Eyes are doing
Strange Cargo: the Doom of the Demeter this month (the set was prominently on stage during Kill Your Darlings), I need to make time to go see that.
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sashagee isn't a fan of non-musical theatre or horror, but I'll happily go myself.
Afterwards we went out to La Pharmacie to try drinks from their
seasonal menu and chat. Like
lisekatevans said, it was just like old times. Gone, but not forgotten, and sometimes they lurch forth from the tomb for one last night on the town.
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conuly
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