AMHERST — Fully aware of the marketing gimmicks driving entertainment these days, Dave MacKeigan said he joked with the cast and crew of Workshop Players Theatre-in-the-Round latest show “we should market this as ‘The Uninvited in 3D’ and see how many glasses we could sell before someone figures it out.”

Kidding aside, the suspense thriller, which opens this weekend and runs through Sept. 26, has posed some real technical challenges.

“It’s a ghost story so imagination and creativity have really been pushed hard on this one,” MacKeigan said.

Careful not to give too much away, especially for those unfamiliar with the story, MacKeigan described “The Uninvited” as the story of a woman and her playwright-brother who acquire a charming but long-empty British home overlooking the Irish Sea at a very low price.

Once in the house, they begin to have some unsettling experiences courtesy of evil spirits tied to a possible murder years earlier.

“It all comes out in the end. There’s a séance that explains just about everything. It all ties together in the end. It should be a fun couple of hours for everyone to get out and enjoy.”

One of the trickiest tasks was how to depict the sibling ghosts in the intimacy of the small theater, which sees the audience seated around the stage on all four sides.

“Some people are about three feet from the stage. You can’t cheat with effects up that close.

“If you’re 15 to 30 feet from the audience you can get away with a lot more. A lot of it is nothing more than lighting. And you need a certain measure of suspension of disbelief.”

While the show’s “spirits” aren’t intended to truly frighten anyone, they should guarantee that people “will get startled here and there,” MacKeigan said.

Despite the storyline’s supernatural elements, the show offers a lot of humor.

Still, the cast worked at striking a balance between laughs and chills.

“It would have been so easy to turn this into a cartoonish story,” MacKeigan said. “We are striving to keep the characters real.”

The suspenseful, supernaturally tinged thriller represents his sixth show at Workshop, following “The Foreigner” and “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” among others.

In addition to directing the show, MacKeigan has overseen the show’s lighting and sound, while his wife, Judy, is in charge of costume design.

MacKeigan credits his entire cast and crew with a lot of hard work and good humor to make the production a treat to stage.

He singled out Dave Cotton, another longtime Workshop veteran, for his artistic design work in creating the set of the seaside home where all of the action is set.

“Dave and Dan Marchand, who built it, did a wonderful job.”

The cast of 10 includes Cindy Bilby, Paul Nelson, Kelly Dillon, Pat Price, Jonathan McCleery and Jeanine Surace.

The play will be performed weekends in Sept. 9 to 26.

For ticket prices, curtain times and reservations, call the box office at (440) 988-5613. To learn more on Workshop Players, visit www.Workshopplayers.com.

Contact Steve Fogarty at 329-7146 or sfogarty@chroniclet.com.

---

Print this story
Report an inappropriate comment

---

In order to comment, you must agree to our user agreement and discussion guidelines.

Need help? Email Us.

---