The Theatre Lunatico Will Perform THE MOORS This October

The Theatre Lunatico ensemble will return to the stage this October, just in time for Halloween. The latest installment of Lunatico’s Tales from Behind the Basement Door series is The Moors by Jen Silverman, a bloody and punk rock take on correspondence between the Brontë sisters that defies both genre and gender roles, modernizing the Victorian gothic for a fresh and twisted take on horror. The play opens Saturday, October 19th and runs through Sunday, November 3rd at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, plus a special performance on Halloween night. Advance tickets are available at https://www.tickettailor.com/events/theatrelunatico/1386909 or can be purchased at the door (including Pay What You Will) subject to availability. For more information on Theatre Lunatico, visit www.theatrelunatico.org

Director Tara Blau Smollen states, “The Moors is a play about grasping at love where you can and grasping at power where you can, revealing the complexities of human desire and ambition in an ever-changing world.” Blau Smollen notes that Theatre Lunatico’s 2024 season is all about women, but where, “The Revolutionists was about women making a better place in the world…The Moors is about survival.” All of the characters in The Moors are neglected. Younger sister Huldey is desperate just for someone to sit with her and hear a page from her diary. Older sister Agatha has assumed a kind of patriarchal role as the head of the household, an act of agency after years of enduring a loneliness that has calcified her very ability to be maternal. Marjory, the maid (or is it Mallory?), does not even have the luxury of a fixed identity, not to mention her life of servitude in this house of cruel and needy individuals. Emilie, the governess, is so desperate for safety and affection, she is drawn to the estate by the promise of a few letters. This physical and emotional exile pushes each character to the point of violence, hungry to rewrite their realities in search of something more bearable. Even the downtrodden family dog wanders out onto the moors to look for God, and when a Moor-Hen arrives at the estate, the Mastiff’s whole world is upended.

It is the perilous moors that give this play its title, setting, and wild energy. Director Tara Blau Smollen says, “the moors act as a seventh character, an ever-changing, living, and breathing thing right outside their door. It has the power to kill you or to give you life.” As Huldey tells Emilie in the play, “if you walked too far you might get turned around and lost and starve to death, or you might even be eaten by something. But in general, the moors are very pretty.” 

In fact, Jen Silverman’s play is inspired not only by the likes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but by the letters and diaries of the three Brontë sisters, who lived their lives on the Yorkshire moors. No mere backdrop, the moors influenced and informed each sisters’ writing and lives so that the line between writer and landscape began to blur. 

Jen Silverman’s work is everywhere these days–The Roommate on Broadway and Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties at Shotgun Players. And for good reason. With The Moors, Silverman upends all our expectations–Victorian horror meets axe murder, mixed with queer sexual tension–adding multidimensional layers to what could have been just a straightforward period piece. Silverman in their playwright notes states: “all the characters have American accents (or accents native to the country of production). Play the anachronisms. This play is about the present.”

Silverman’s plays have a knack for abstracting heterosexual relationship dynamics and roles–still the societal accepted norm–and thus examines how those ideas permeate even in queer experiences. The closest thing to a heterosexual relationship that exists within The Moors is the absurd, nearly self-contained story between the Mastiff and theMoor-Hen. Romance emerges between these two animals, but at every turn it is fraught with misunderstanding and unequal power dynamics. The Mastiff’s need to be loved becomes dangerous–a violence that escapes all his romanticizing. 

The moors as depicted in Jen Silverman’s play evoke our current world, filled with instability and environmental chaos. As the character Agatha states, “despite our attempts to cling to a modicum of civilization, we find ourselves often forced to contend with savagery.” It’s against this brutal backdrop that the characters in The Moors live out the very human need to belong and to be seen.   

The  ensemble cast of The Moors includes Rachel Brown, Devon deGroot, Shawn Oda, James Perry, Sophie Ruf, and Lauri Smith. Production Team includes Tara Blau Smollen (director), Verena Lee (stage manager), Umut Yalcinkaya (set designer), Francesca Berlow (lighting designer), Michael Barr (sound designer, producer), Gendell Hing-Hernandez (fight choreographer), Steve Egelman (composer), Loran Watkins (costumer designer), Francesca Beck (dramaturg), and Craig Smollen (set construction). Theatre Lunatico is a fully vaccinated and boosted company. All audience members are requested to be fully vaccinated and masking is optional inside the theater. Performers will be unmasked during the performance. We reserve the right to change our policy in order to comply with federal, state, and local requirements.

Theatre Lunatico is a Berkeley-based, ensemble physical theatre company devoted to  narratives that place women center stage through the unique interpretive lens of our storytelling and commitment to gender parity casting. More information is available at  www.TheatreLunatico.org. 

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