Hellerween: Shorts To Scare You Shortsless
101 Archer
Tulsa
Oct. 28, 2023
It was, for real, a dark and stormy night when I hiked through the cold to Hellerween. For the second year in a row, this annual short scary play festival took place in the building now called 101 Archer (formerly the headquarters of ahha Tulsa, whose abrupt closing last year still vaguely haunts the corner of Boston and Archer), where the ghosts of arts experiences past provided an appropriately spooky background for an evening of eerie entertainment. Guests showed up in costume for the third and last night of the festival, which presented plays on several floors of this giant and still mostly empty space. I came as a writer — turtleneck, blazer, glasses, notebook — but evidently my getup wasn’t enough of a disguise to get me a free raffle ticket like Rollerblade Ken and Barbie got. (Ken won the gift card at the end of the night: well played, whoever you are.)
We gathered in the main gallery for snacks and instructions before being split into groups and taken through the building to see six short plays in succession. Heller Theatre Company is known for experimenting with the boundaries of theatrical experience; here, the plays’ directors set up their scenes in all manner of spaces, with simple lighting and props turning nondescript rooms like the media lab into zones where horror could unfold. After many hours sitting in theater seats and at a laptop in recent days, I appreciated the chance to walk through the action. (Kudos to the actors, who performed each play nearly 20 times during the run.) I wouldn’t have minded an experience that was even more continuously immersive, but maybe that gets dangerously close to haunted house/GUTS Nightmare territory. The caution tape and excellent bloody footprint stickers on the floors here were probably plenty.
The six plays ranged from spooky/silly to spooky/serious, dropping us into scenes like an inexplicably repetitive conversation that got darker the longer it went on (“Loop,” by B. L. Hardgrove, directed by Jeremy Garrett), a forced birth legal nightmare (“The PP,” by Kelley Childers Friedberg, directed by Deborah J. Hunter), and a The Last Of Us zombie aftermath scenario that started with a bang as actor Caleb Baumgardner slammed (on purpose) into the room’s window from outside (“Fiona Fawn’s Post-Apocalyptic Radio Show,” by Helen Patterson, directed by Andrew Smith).
The strongest pieces of the night were possibly also the weirdest. (Note to future Hellerween playwrights and directors: don’t be afraid to go demented.) Everett LeViness’s darkly hilarious “Defenestration Class,” directed by Dmitri Stevens and voted “crowd favorite” at the end of the night, began with actor Kathleen Hope guiding us onto the building’s outdoor terrace to take part in a PTA meeting at a school whose mission is to ensure that young people are properly prepared for a future in which they may be regularly required to throw themselves out of windows. A meeting speaker feared the school was going soft, that it would be all “trampolines and bubble wrap” before long. One student, rising to the absurdity of the situation, protested the entire purpose of the place — and was promptly, you guessed it, defenestrated. My favorite line involved a description of one kid who was so hard that, after landing on the ground, “he came limping back upstairs for notes.”
In the ace “It Only Takes One,” directed by Aedan James, playwright David Blakely concocted a slow burn mystery with a stinger of a climax. As Kathryn Hartney and Hannah Gray donned serious tactical gear, their discussion of an apparent incoming rogue attack became more and more suspenseful (and, retroactively, funnier) as Hartney’s character began to reveal she’d betrayed them both to the enemy: literal bugs. (At first, she agreed to let just one in. Before long, it was all over: “They said if I opened the screen door they’d let me relocate to Montreal!”) And director Jennifer Lynn had a hit in the terrifying bedroom scene she built under the first floor stairwell for Helen Patterson’s “I Only Eat The Dying,” where the exceptional young actors Londyn Anderson and Nichole Finch did a macabre pas de deux (only a creepy hand’s length from the audience) on themes of death, sacrifice, and what we’d do to protect our families from experiencing our pain.
In between plays, as volunteers took guests to the next station, we hunkered in corridors and in the elevator, breaking the tension of waiting with strangers with occasional jokes about how this would actually be the perfect setting for a scary story. If we’d been sitting the whole time, we probably wouldn’t have acknowledged each other or our physical environment at all. As we roamed between floors, riffing on the plays we’d just seen, it was clear how key this sort of theatre is for audiences who might think of the art form as remote from them, who might not think of themselves as the storytellers they are. Several of this festival’s pieces were developed in Heller’s Playwright’s Lab of Tulsa, which is open to anyone who wants to try their hand. I myself was trapped in this building’s elevator once, with (if memory serves) two performance artists, a filmmaker, and a dog. Maybe I’ll write that up for next year’s Hellerween.
Next for Alicia: The Trail to Oregon!
