(This is a project I'm involved with this fall with Les Freres Corbusier.)
Hell House
A Hell House is a multi-room theatrical experience—part installation art,
part play, and part haunted house. Every year, on and around Halloween,
thousands of Hell Houses are staged by Christian Evangelicals in communities
across America.
Unlike traditional, secular haunted houses, Hell Houses feature not ghouls
and ghosts, but instead teenagers having abortions, gay men dying of AIDS,
and children reading Harry Potter—all acts resulting in damnation. Hell
Houses are didactic, cautionary, and polemical. By depicting the everlasting
misery sinners suffer, these productions allow Evangelicals to scare
unbelievers straight. Most performances result in scores of conversions or
recommitments to the church.
Les Freres Corbusier’s Hell House will feature roughly 12 rooms of
performance and a corps of nearly 100 actors, designers, and technicians.
After journeys through earth, hell, and heaven, the show climaxes in larger
room of celebration featuring the music of a live Christian rock band, a
game of “Pin the Sin on Jesus,” and white powdered donuts.
Between October 1st and 29th, we'll be performing the show each night (with
Mondays off) from 7.30pm to 10pmish, with 10 tours lasting 45-minutes each,
and start times staggered at 15-minute intervals. All performances will be
at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO.
History of Hell Houses
Hell Houses bear many similarities to medieval pageant plays, but the
contemporary form first appeared in the late 1970s, authored by Rev. Jerry
Falwell. In 1992, Keenan Roberts, now pastor of the Destiny Church in
Arvada, CO, continued the tradition and began to sell Hell House Outreach™"
kits to other churches. These kits include a 263-page manual, covering
everything from casting to publicity to instructions to making hamburger
meat look like a fetus and storing vats of blood.
Roberts has received international attention through an appearance on the
Phil Donahue Show, and via reports in the London Times, MS Magazine, The New
York Times, and Newsweek Magazine. He told the Denver Post that he designed
Hell Houses to "show young people that they can go to hell for abortion,
adultery, homosexuality, drinking and other things unless they repent and
end the behavior." In his first three years of business, Roberts sold 300
kits and entertained 20,000 guests. Since then approximately 3,000 Hell
Houses have operated across the country.
Hell House is strictly presented according to guidelines of the Hell House
Outreach™" kits distributed by Destiny Church, with certain updating for
2006.
Concept behind the New York Production
Hell House marks the first Hell House ever produced in New York City. Les
Freres Corbusier’s will stage the show as a “sociological artifact,” with
all due reverence that that entails.
Regardless of the politics or opinions of individual participants in this
production, all efforts will be made to re-create in full a traditional Hell
House. This means: no mentions of New York-centric issues, no high-tech
theatrical design elements that Evangelicals wouldn’t incorporate, and
perhaps most difficult, no irony. The show should accurately reconstruct the
experience of traveling through an authentic Hell House, so winking by the
performers or altering the script for comedic purposes must be resisted.
Certainly a Hell House is an organically generated form of live performance,
but if minor liberties will are taken, it is essential that every departure
from the text or from the known elements of real Hell Houses passes the
litmus test of “What would the Evangelicals do?” If they would not feature a
certain racy prop item, we will not include it, no matter how humorous its
effect. Additionally, we must avoid too polished a performance, for Hell
Houses are typically staged with limited resources. Our actors and designers
must embody the seeming oxymoron of “well-rehearsed amateurism.”
We remain mindful that the shock and other visceral reactions which
individual audience members will surely experience in their visit to Hell
House will be diminished by the inclusion of inside jokes or visual gags
that do not belong to the world of the Evangelicals. Let the Evangelicals
speak for themselves. They provide a more incisive critique of their rigid
set of principles than any satirical device we might offer.
1:25 PM
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