UNHOLY TRINITY: A Lovecraft Triptych

Over the course of his career San Francisco theatre artist Stuart Bousel has crafted a staggering number of plays as adapter, writer, and director. Even his plays rooted in the most immediate and realistic of settings are informed by a strong grasp of the mythological, elevating even the grittiest work into the transcendent. Unsurprisingly, Bousel's work demonstrates an affinity for genre: his production of Wendy MacLeod's The House of Yes leaned beautifully into the Gothic horror lurking in the play's heart without losing its wit or humanity; and Dick 3, his adaptation of Richard III for San Francisco Theatre Pub (a group he co-founded), artfully transmuted the bloody and towering history play into a brisk, engaging and entertaining "Shakespearean slasher."

Bousel's talents (and many of his preoccupations) are on display in UNHOLY TRINITY, a triptych adapted from the writings of HP Lovecraft and Anne Helen Crofts. With startling smoothness, Bousel and his talented cast of eight actors bring Lovecraft's tales to life, capturing both the intense interiority of his prose and the expansive, cosmic dread of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

Ever the busy artist, Bousel has curated a theatre festival that opens immediately after this production closes, but graciously took the time to discuss the origins of UNHOLY TRINITY, his approach to adapting Lovecraft, and his thoughts on genre and theatre.

UNHOLY TRINITY has been gestating for a while, yes? (I recall actor Brian Martin mentioning a reading of THE DUNWICH HORROR several years ago.) What prompted you to explore the Lovecraft mythos on stage?

So, I actually first staged NYARLATHOTEP, one of the stories that makes up UNHOLY TRINITY, as my directing final my junior year of college. We had to stage a 10-15 minute piece that was expressly not intended for theatrical production, and I chose that, and while my staging was completely different from the one happening at the EXIT, a lot of the initial ideas that would eventually come together to make UNHOLY TRINITY were born. Then yes, many years later, for Theater Pub, I did a sort of radio version of THE DUNWICH HORROR in which Brian Martin, who is in UNHOLY TRINITY was cast (as Curtis, that time around). So, I've been revisiting the material ever since, and my ultimate goal was to eventually create a piece very much in line with what's currently at the EXIT. Incidentally, I also adapted THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP at one point, for my screenwriting class in college. It did not make it into this final version, but I had originally seen that, and not THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE, as the third piece in the trinity. DREAMS fits so much better though, as it has the link of academia which allowed the professor heroes of DUNWICH to be present through the whole evening, and create a through line rather than just have the show be an anthology (though it is that too). As for what draws me to Lovecraft... honestly, it's the language and the atmosphere he creates. I'm also originally from the East Coast, and there's an appeal to New England magic and witchcraft that I think a lot of us born and raised in proximity to those areas have as an intrinsic part of our childhoods. I love how Lovecraft mixes these historical and traditional folklore elements into his ultimate vision of secret cults trying to bring about the end of the world.

The set, designed by Christian Heppenstal, lit by Curtis Overacre. Photo by Jay Yamada.


On the page, Lovecraft's language seems a bit tricky for theatrical adaptation. Can you talk about either the changes you had to make to make the tales work on stage, or what is inherent in the texts that made them ripe for this kind of exploration?

I approached Lovecraft's language, which is tricky (the man loves his run-on sentences) with the same approach I tend to take when adapting and/or cutting Shakespeare: i.e. carefully, and with the goal of helping what's at the core of the piece emerge, rather than attempting to impose my own agenda on it, using the language to create the tone and atmosphere as much as to tell the story in a straightforward sense, while using the cuts or changes to downplay or remove whatever I felt got in the way of the audience really appreciating the core of the piece. Lovecraft doesn't tend to have a lot of spoken dialogue in his stories, but he does in DUNWICH, actually, and even has a lot of dialogue spoken in vernacular and accents, which made that adaptation a little easier. With all the pieces, however, it became about deciding which character in the story would be the one to reveal what information, with what they knew, or didn't know, or were worried about, or were invested in, tending to determine when they spoke what part of the narrative. Once I knew which characters I wanted to extract from the works, I was able to slowly but surely carve out some distinct personalities and voices mostly just by making sure the parts of the narrative they spoke were consistent with who they were. In some places I definitely add my own dialogue, but I try to weave it in as much as possible. I think it's a huge credit to the cast that largely you can't tell exactly which writer is talking when, but if I'm being honest about a third of the text is me, two thirds Lovecraft.

Your cast take a uniformly earthy approach to the text throughout UNHOLY TRINITY. Did you notice any particular challenges Lovecraft poses to actors that they don't encounter anywhere else?

The challenges the actors face are maybe less distinct to Lovecraft so much as common to heavily narrative, vs. dramatic, work as a whole. The real challenge is making storytelling into storytelling, not just reporting, which is hard to sit through for 80 minutes, you know? But then that's about each actor investing emotionally in the part of the story they get to tell. So helping them connect to the work and make it personal was the real challenge, so that we didn't end up with people just standing there, reciting a story for the audience, in monotone. I kept referencing Greek Tragedy, actually, and how the messengers in Greek Tragedy are really invested in the stories they tell, which is why their speeches are often the best ones in any given play, and real bring down the house moments if done well, and I kept encouraging the actors to always see everything they said as coming with a sense of urgency that was compelling them to share this story with an audience. They weren't telling this story because they wanted to- but because they needed to.

Ellen Dunphy as Keziah Mason, THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE. Photo by Jay Yamada.

One of the more bracing aspects of your work over the years is your enthusiastic embrace of genre elements - one feels like many of your peers might regard genre (horror, especially) as a theatrical ghetto, but you embrace it with gusto. Do you sense a resistance among other theatre artists to rigorously explore genre? Do you feel (FULL DISCLOSURE as I do) that other theatre makers only approach genre and horror via camp?

The problem with approaching anything via camp as a means or aesthetic is that camp actually only works if it's organic- when it's engineered too consciously, it's no longer really camp, just campy, which isn't the same. But that's really a topic for another interview. I don't deny that Lovecraft has a certain goofiness to him and we try to lean in to those moments really hard, I just also make it a point to lean into the sincere emotions when they occur (rare in Lovecraft- so a lot of those we found as a troupe), and the beauty of the imagery, the language etc. I told the cast to play everything straight, and let the audience decide what had and hadn't aged well, or was sort of unintentionally ridiculous. I also steered away from flashy effects and boo moments, both of which I think often fail in theater, and is why horror as a genre isn't one we see much on stage. When we do, and when it works, it's usually a result of pacing, atmosphere, and precise but restrained use of heightened reality moments which draw an audience in, lull them into a false sense of security, and then find ways to get in under their skin- usually with emotional authenticity. I think SWEENEY TODD does this beautifully, and to a lesser extent, or maybe just in a different way, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Both of which are considered classics so I don't know that I agree that genre is a theatrical ghetto because the longest running show in the history of Broadway is a genre piece, you know? I think it's more that genre is just hard to pull off well, and so many companies shy away from it, or spoof it rather then present it with any kind of emotional truth or sincere celebration of the form. That said, there's been a lot more companies devoted to genre, whether that's fantasy or sci-fi or horror, than in the past, so if it's a ghetto, it is a progressively populated one.

Personally, I tend to think of a lot of my work as magical realist and or surrealist with a folklore/mythology bent. There are often elements of otherworldliness or enchantment but I'm not sure if that's the same as genre as most people mean genre. In fact, generally speaking, it's the genre world, not the more conventional theater world, that has rejected my work. So I'm not sure that I do see this resistance that you see, though I agree that strictly speaking, we don't see a lot of dyed-in-the-wool genre happening at, say, regional theaters. But like... HAMLET is a ghost story, MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is a fairy tale, INTO THE WOODS is all the fairy tales, ANGELS IN AMERICA is full blown mythological epic, and as technology has become central to human experience we're seeing more and more plays we would have once considered science fiction, certainly as, say, Ray Bradbury conceived of it, THE NETHER being the first example that comes to mind. From where I stand, American Kitchen Sink realism seems pretty on the wane. Even if companies aren't leaning in to genre work, they are much more open to it than they have been in the past. It's definitely being taken more seriously as art. I think what will be interesting to see is if those genre artists who thrived partly due to the ghettoized nature of their work will continue to do so as wider audiences maybe come to expect more from the work than genre aesthetic alone. Ie. content. Because if we're gonna get real here, my issue with a lot of genre work (and I expect it's the case for those who poo-poo genre work in general) has been that often it lacks content and relies very heavily on aesthetic and the specific aesthetic of the ghetto it and its principal audience have occupied.

What's next once UNHOLY TRINITY has completed its run?

The SF Olympians Festival, which I curate, and in which I have a piece that is getting performed on November 7th, and three pieces I am directing that will be performed on November 22nd. Find out more at www.sfolympians.com.

UNHOLY TRINITY completes its run this weekend, with shows Thursday thru Saturday, October 31-November 2nd, at the Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy Street in downtown San Francisco. Tickets can be bought right here.

YBCA: IN A GLASS CAGE

It isn't necessarily time to fulfill a semi-promise made last year, but memories remain of the still-ended film program at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Some memories are stronger than others, and some experiences will stick in the front of my head until I put them down. Some of these posts will celebrate milestones in the film program. This one, however, centers not on the curatorial largesse of Joel Shepard but on a particularly memorable screening. One of the freakiest I've ever attended. Read on...

In A Glass Cage had a three-show run in May 2011 at YBCA. It was a new print that was making the rounds; smaller distributors announce their offerings to various theatres and programmers, and in those days Joel was often the only programmer adventurous enough to jump on some of the more esoteric films thrown his way. (There were a few restored classics over the years that Joel was astonished he landed; he couldn't believe that no other cinema in the Bay Area was as excited as he to show certain films.) The debut film by Spanish filmmaker Agustí Villaronga (who based it on the life of Gilles de Rais), In A Glass Cage tells the story of a decrepit Nazi child molester who falls into the care of one of his former victims. A certain level of controversy still hovered over the film given its rigor, politics, and explicit sex and violence. There were about fifteen of us in the audience, braced for something quiet, disturbing, and confrontational.

Interjection: YBCA's house managers fill out a report form at the end of every event. There's a box to check if everything goes fine and without incident, and a number of spaces to fill in details on anything that goes wrong (facilities things like the room being too cold or too warm, problems brought up by audience members, etc.)

So the movie quietly reveals itself to be an austere, slowburn treatment of its subject matter, creating a grey, humid world in which its characters regard each other with unspoken but deeeeep volumes of hatred, longing, and emotions too complex to express.

About twenty minutes in some guy and his date blow in, making quite a lot of noise as they get acclimatized to the low light of the movie and try to find the best seats. Plenty of space near the door where they could just sit the fuck down and not disturb anybody, but it's almost as if they deliberately pick (after much debate and calculation) the longest path across the space between the door and available seats. There's been very little exposition at this point in the movie, but the newcomers are a little louder than they have to be in trying to catch each other up.

Then the guy, from somewhere in his jacket pocket (which he makes a weird amount of noise trying to find), withdraws a particularly crinkly snack bag (Doritos or something) which he noisily opens and even more noisily starts eating.

Three rows in front of him, a reedy, older moviegoer (a regular I believe - don't recall exactly who but believe I had seen him there before or since), gets up out of his seat, walks to the aisle, walks back to this guy's row, walks up to him, AND SNATCHES THE BAG OUT OF HIS HANDS and storms back to the aisle, back down the aisle to his row, then back to his seat.

The Screening Room at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts seats 94 people, in eight rows of seats. It would be hard for all of this not to be noticed in the average house of your average multiplex, but this shit is EXPLODING and bouncing off the metal walls that line the powderkeg of this little room.

So the latecomer gets out of his seat, goes to the aisle, down the aisle, then up to the snatcher and demands to know what the fuck his problem is. The snatcher tries to make his case while keeping his voice down, God love him, though the particular mood of IN A GLASS CAGE has been pretty much destroyed by this time, as the drama unfolding in the audience has escalated far more quickly than Agustí Villaronga would have ever allowed. All of the moviegoers are completely distracted by the drama unfolding in their midst, which seems to be headed to a violent resolution more quickly than the movie. But someone in a seat near the door has left the room, and soon the house manager has poked her head in and left, and soon after that Security arrives to escort BOTH men from the screening room. (The latecomer's date follows him out.) None of them return, but no one in the audience is on the wavelength of the movie, and though the rest of the screening goes without incident the movie's chances at taking us in were pretty much dashed.

I later found that the latecomer had split from a performance in the Forum (a larger space on the floor below the screening room) and, having announced that the quality of that performance not to his liking, demanded to be let into the movie upstairs since he figured YBCA owed him one.

"Whatever the case," I thought to myself, "she won't be able to check that box tonight."