Bellwether

“At night, when I go to bed, I still am at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blankets after the lights go out. I’m not a child anymore but… I don’t like to sleep with one leg sticking out. Because if a cool hand ever reached out from under the bed and grasped my ankle, I might scream. […] The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn’t real. I know that, and I also know that if I’m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”

― Stephen King

It’s October. Halloween approaches. The haunted houses are opening, and everyone’s ready for a good scare.

As you can tell by the front cover of the program, this play is a little spooky. (Maybe more than “a little”.) This is a play that celebrates the scary things, the things that go bump in the night, and the monster under the bed. It’s a play for chills and thrills. It’s a play for October. It’s a play for Halloween.

Like the best of horror fiction, though, Bellwether does more than excite us and get our adrenaline going. Horror helps us talk about our fears and our worries and the real horrors that surround us daily. These scary things come in all shapes and sizes, and have faces that range from the fantastic to the mundane. Horror puts them in a form where we can see them and (hopefully) defeat them.

I think I’ll stop there … I don’t want to give away too much about the particular thrills of Bellwether. Steve Yockey’s play is unpredictable and exciting, and since this is only its second production you probably have no idea what’s about to happen.

That’s the perfect way to experience it.

“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

― Stephen King