PICT brings a haunting ghost story to Mister Rogers’ old neighborhood
WQED’s Fred Rogers Studio has a history as a safety zone from things that go bump in the night, but PICT Classic Theatre is about to change all that.
The East End theater company extends the Halloween fright season into November by performing the classic ghost story “The Woman in Black” in the former home of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” PICT artistic director Alan Stanford has deep roots in the history of the play that comes with the warning “for 14+, the intent is to frighten.”
The play that he now directs for PICT debuted in London in 1987, then was revived in 1989 — and has haunted the U.K.’s Fortune Theater ever since. More than 7 million theatergoers have come to see the ghost story by novelist Susan Hill and brought to life by
Stephen Mallatratt’s stage adaptation, using sound and lighting to ignite the scariest sparks of our imaginations.
Daniel Radcliffe starred in a 2012 big-screen version with a populous cast, but the story onstage is a twohander — PG Performers of the Year Martin Giles and James FitzGerald for PICT.
The framework is of a play within a play, as a lawyer hires an actor to tutor him in recounting to family and friends a story that has long troubled him. It concerns the funeral of an elderly recluse, where the lawyer caught sight of the woman in black. The mere mention of her terrifies the locals. She is a specter who haunts the area where her illegitimate child was accidentally killed, and anyone who sees her dies. The lawyer has invited friends to watch as he and the actor re-create the events of that “dark and stormy night” …
Stanford has acted in the play in Dublin, the first time, not long after it debuted in England and with John Tuttine, one of the original cast members. After that initial Dublin run, “We brought it to the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., and it’s just an amazing piece of theater,” Stanford recalled. The book is “a conventional ghost story,” he continued, “but what this guy Stephen Mallatratt did, he turned it into a brilliant expression of what theater is all about — actors getting the audience to use their imaginations.”
The first time he performed in the play, he wondered how the minimalist staging would work.
“And, oh my God, does it work!,” Stanford said. “Because the audience is brought into the story so simply and so cleverly. … And it is based on the principle that what frightens us is what we can’t quite see, and what is suggested.”
In the program, Stanford has put the Scottish prayer that he believes sums up the feelings brought to light by “The Woman in Black,” and he recites it from memory:
From ghoulies and ghosties / And long-leggedy beasties / And things that go bump in the night,/ Good Lord, deliver us!
The thrills for Stanford during rehearsal have been watching Giles and FitzGerald, longtime PICT players, preparing to scare us in the opener of PICT’s third season at the Fred Rogers Studio of WQED in Oakland.
The company had bounced from its longtime home in the Stephen Foster Memorial in Oakland, to the Union Project in Stanton Heights, and finally to WQED, where it has settled in for what Stanford hopes is the long haul. The company’s offices have moved just across Fifth Avenue to the Rodef Shalom Congregation.
It was Richard Hudic, executive director of the Regional Asset District, who first suggested the space, and a meeting with Deborah Acklin, president and CEO of WQED Multimedia, sealed the deal.
The size and sightlines are ideal, Stanford said, and the space is accessible for all. Also, QED has installed new bathrooms that are hoped to reduce long lines at intermission. As a further lure, there is a new Fred Rogers art installation in the building through December.
Stanford recalled walking into the studio for the first time. “It is a bit like walking onto holy ground, and I just said, ‘This is it. Yes. We can make magic in here.’ ”
Being in a space where Mister Rogers showed the way to “make-believe” seems like the perfect spot for a theater.
“The atmosphere is, he’s still there,” Stanford said. “So if you conjure the ghost of the woman in black, don’t be surprised if you see the man in the red sweater as well.”