Touchstone Theatre Creates Original Halloween Show, Into the Dark

Touchstone Theatre, an Ensemble known for creating powerful original work premieres a haunting new offering for the Halloween season, entitled Into the Dark. The show opens Thursday October 13th and runs through the 23rd.

The play is composed of uniquely Touchstone takes on the traditional tropes of scary movies - vampires, werewolves, demons, and ghouls. It also touches on more subtly psychological horror, with scenes where the antagonist is a shadow, a reflection in a mirror, or simply an eerily absence of company.

For Touchstone Artistic Director JP Jordan, it's a dream come true. "I've long been a fan of the horror genre, especially Sam Raimi's Evil Dead Trilogy, Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, the overwhelming horror campiness of Ed Wood, and the now largely extinct theatrical style known as Grand Guignol. Since arriving at Touchstone six years ago, I've been working with the Ensemble to explore horror, and I'm pleased that we are finally taking our first steps Into the Dark."

The Touchstone Ensemble began brainstorming the specifics of what this show would look like in the late spring. Over the summer, they developed, scripted, and work shopped original scenes and dynamic characters, and since the end of August, the cast has been deep into rehearsing and working as a team to bring these vignettes to life.

In one storyline, Ensemble Member Cathleen O'Malley portrays Miss Annie Sherry, a real life Bethlehem native of the late 1800s and a passenger on an ill-fated eastbound train to Atlantic City. Through fragments of memory and chilling wisps of historical detail, Miss Sherry appears periodically throughout the show, weaving through scenes, seeking out the terrifying and tragic conclusion to her story.

Another intense scene featured in the evening is envisioned by Touchstone Ensemble Member and co-founder Bill George, surrounding forces of good, evil, and temptation. He describes the scene as "darkly erotic and dream-like. This five person, thirty minute long one-act explores the suppressed desires and sexual conflicts of a lonely young man one proverbial ‘dark and stormy night.'"

Though the show is rooted in themes of horror and suspense, that doesn't mean there aren't moments of levity. One piece directed by Ensemble Member Emma Chong focus on the black humor of the bloody, original Grimm fairy tales. "Happily, they don't need a lot of embellishment," she notes. "The Grimms' original versions of stories like Cinderella and Rapunzel are deliciously dark and nasty already."

Into the Dark plays October 13-23rd, 8pm Thursdays-Saturdays and 2pm Sundays. Tickets are $25, $15 for students and seniors. On Thursdays, Touchstone offers Pay-What-You-Will, where patrons purchasing tickets at the door may name their own price. To purchase tickets or for more information on the coming season, contact Touchstone Theatre at 610-867-1689 or visit www.touchstone.org

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