What plays (ghost stories, tense dramas, etc.) have given you the shivers? What playwriting and staging techniques to you think are most effective to scare and thrill an audience? For all who reply, thanks for sharing your opinions.
Yes, and I agree! I saw a marvelous production at Stages Theater in Houston. The movie version was okay, but that stageplay was to die for. Thanks for reminding me.
I'm having a halloween party for my son and his new friends here in Cambridge and was thinking of writing a short scary play to be performed in our garden shed/haunted house. Any ideas?
What was that play on broadway with the blind guy a few years back? And a robbery? That was scary.
Swann, could you give an idea of the ages of the young people involved? Some old fashioned scary folktales could be great for little kids--those stories with the "got-ya" endings turned into a short play (such as The Hairy Toe story, or my grandma's special "As I was spinning and I was weaving, I heard a noise . . .") I can send you more for little ones, if that's appropriate.
Also, Robert Frost wrote a wonderfule scary poem called "The Witch of Coos" (unreliable narrator and all), which could be dramatized for a slightly older audience. Some great images in that one--the skeleton shimmering like a chandelier.
I agree about QUILLS - but more so, that playwright (Doug Wright)'s other play WATBANALAND. Way creepier.
Also Sarah Kane's SAVED, PHAEDRA'S LOVE, and BLASTED, Caryl Churchill's VINEGAR TOM, any good more-guignol-than-camp production of Wilde's SALOME, the final scene of Cheryl L. West's HOLIDAY HEART, Lucy Gough's MAPPING THE SOUL, and (forgot the playwright's name's) THE OVERWHELMING.