The Dead Gallery: The Phobias

The event I went to was the production of the Dead Gallery:The Phobias put on by Eastern Michigan University in honor of Halloween. The production took place in the lab theatre of Quirk, and lasted only about 20 minutes. It had four actors who were always on stage, who were leading a sort of gallery of fear. Throughout the show, they pulled “unwitting audience participants” to the stage and made them live through their biggest fears. The production culminated in a man whose greatest fear was losing the ones that he loved be manipulated into murdering his best friend. Then a stagehand came in and made everyone leave as quickly as possible. All in all, I did think that the production was entertaining, though not nearly as spooky as was probably …show more content…
For one thing, it starts out with a wild claim that it is unscripted. This is believable for a moment, until they bring the first “participant” from behind the curtain. The problem is that the “participant” lines are in the same basic style as the other lines. They are stilted and formal, obviously preformative. Now it is really difficult to write a line that sound unscripted and random, but I feel that the play depended on the writers having that ability. As they obviously don’t, the premise and creepiness are negated. It stops being as much of an interaction and just keeps being the audience watching a performance. That being said, I did think that the dementophobia part was written really well. Dementophobia is the fear of going insane. During this section, the actors stand in the audience and say different lines, while a pleasant voice repeats in the background that dementophobia is the fear of going insane, of losing ones grip on reality. The culmination of this is a lot of movement, and a really chilling scream from the “participant.” That part was pretty cool, the rest had its moments, but was negated by the stilted lines that were littered