Art Credit - Seth McCombs
Photo Credit - Justin Wilder
Redrum: Hunt was a longform improvisational theater piece that was performed at the Providence Improv Guild (PIG) in October, 2019. Unlike most shows at PIG, Redrum was not comedic. It was a horror story that was performed throughout the Southside Cultural Arts Center.
The way the show worked was that the audience would gather outside and be given masks to wear. A pair of "guides," two sinister villains in fancy clothes, then welcomed the audience inside with the direction to never speak. Once inside the building, the audience would choose to follow one guide or the other as they went to different parts of the building and watched the story unfold. Each audience member could potentially see a significantly different part of the story depending on who they chose to follow at any given time.
Melissa Bowler and Mindy McCombs came up with the story: a group of thieves are hired by a mysterious billionaire to find an artifact hidden away in a condemned building. I directed the show and did some world building, adding in supernatural elements like the mysterious "entities," who wandered the halls and terrorized the audience and cast alike, and the "building dwellers," who were terrified people who had been trapped in the building for decades.
The show was a daunting challenge, because it required us not only to have multiple scenes going on in different parts of the building simultaneously, but to make sure the audience could find its way to those scenes without getting in the way of the actors. It was a challenge for the actors as well, as they had to maintain their terrified and/or terrifying characters for the entirety of the show's 60-minute runtime.
As if that wasn't enough of a challenge, we randomized the order in which our hapless thieves would be killed off each show.
