by Scott Gibson
As the aspens turn gold, the temperatures begin to drop, and night descends a bit earlier each evening, The Evergreen Players prepare for their upcoming Halloween-themed autumn show, “A Dark and Stormy Night.”
The curtain will rise on Friday, October 17 for opening night and the show will run for two weekends, through Sunday, October 26.
This year, the Players—currently celebrating their 70th anniversary in existence as Colorado’s oldest, continuously operating community theatre—will be attempting something just a little bit different. Half of the evening’s performance will be given over to two suspenseful one-act plays, and the other half to “EverSCREAM Readings.”
“ …we want to make this an immersive experience for everyone who attends.”
This is EverSCREAM’s third year of offering up readings of classic short and frightful stories by the likes of Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Previously, the husband-and-wife duo of Leann and Eric Ritter presented these as a separate eerie evening, utilizing The Players’ old Studio Space on Fireweed Drive, but this year, they are partnering with The Evergreen Players to share an evening of chills and thrills at Center Stage on Meadow Drive.
“October is just made-to-order for a little friendly fright,” Players president Kathleen Davis notes. “And we want to make this an immersive experience for everyone who attends. For the first time ever, Ovation West (formerly The Evergreen Chorale) is planning to transform all of Center Stage into a walk-through haunted house on Halloween weekend. So, it’s our plan to ‘tag-team’ off of them: Our shows close the weekend before this will take place, but we’ve asked Ovation West to go ahead and set up their theatre’s lobby the way they intend to have it arranged to greet their guests on All Hallows Eve. This way, our audiences will get a preview of what will be in store for them when they return to get the full Ovation West haunted house experience. And by getting a taste of what awaits them then, we hope they will walk into the auditorium for our show and take their seats already pumped for the thrills and chills that ‘A Dark and Stormy Night’ has to offer.”
“ …our audiences will get a preview of what will be in store for them when they return to get the full Ovation West haunted house experience.”
The two short plays that will be The Evergreen Players’ portion of the evening are “The Seated Queen,” in which a husband and wife who are bedeviled by a poltergeist-like spirit engage the services of a spiritualist to rid their home of the entity. In “At the Far End of the Garden,” three strangers sit in an otherwise deserted bus station in a small, out-of-the-way town during a raging blizzard. As they await the arrival of a bus that may or may not make it through the storm, their talk turns to previous unsettling experiences each has had, causing them to grow increasingly suspicious of one another.
“A Dark and Stormy Night” is designed to be family-friendly, although some elements may be a little too intense for smaller folk.
The show runs Friday and Saturday evenings at 7:30 pm (October 17, 18, 24 and 25) with matinees at 2 pm on Sunday, October 19, Saturday, October 25, and Sunday, October 26. More information is available on The Evergreen Players website at evergreenplayers.org and tickets may be reserved there as well.
