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'Incubus' requires incubation to grow beyond shock theater
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Wednesday, October 2, 2002
One thing is for sure: "The Incubus Archives" is unlike any other theater event you'll experience this fall.
Here's the drill: The audience has a choice of four different staging areas -- from a theaterlike setting to a spooky dressing room/bathroom -- at the Off-Center, a former warehouse, to view the performance. Actors move in and out of each area, and that means scenes are performed in a different sequence depending on where you are. Presented as a tour of an imaginary archive of crime memorabilia, "The Incubus Archives" is partly audience-interactive: You'll be given the chance to ask Hitler's pillow a question or be offered a piece of candy. A motley cast of seven characters -- including Malcolm (played with great intensity by Bradley Carlin), a juvenile-acting serial murderer; and Mrs. Duncan (Christina J. Moore), the chain-smoking, wheelchair-bound daughter of the man who founded the archive -- are your hosts on this 90-minute tour through the history of evil where they present everything from the dress Sharon Tate was murdered in to a life-sized cardboard Jack the Ripper.
A new play by W. David Hancock (he won an Obie for "The Race of the Ark Tattoo," which Hyde Park Theatre staged here in 1998 to much acclaim) and co-produced by the Rude Mechanicals and Hyde Park Theatre, "The Incubus Archives" was commissioned by Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre and marks the directorial return of former Frontera artistic director Vicky Boone after a brief hiatus.
Stage designer Leilah Stewart has transformed every inch the Off-Center into a run-down archive sideshow, lining halls with shaky shelves towering with document boxes and macabre art that is artfully lit by Stephen Pruitt and filled with sounds (lots of heartbeats and heaving breathing) by Emily Fordyce.
There's a lot of elements stuffed into the carnivalesque "Archives." Boone and company are to be commended for taking on a big theatrical challenge in developing this show. Still, some of it asks to be synchronized into a whole. A few of the scenarios border on shock theater for shock theater's sake. And with the exception of Malcolm and Mrs. Duncan, many of the characters want for more development and depth.
Hancock is a talented playwright plumbing the depth of humankind's evil and how we recognize or document that evil. That's terrific artistic material. Yet, terrific as the material is, it begs for a little more realization.
jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699