Our work in DC and Baltimore started with Edgar Allan Poe. We partnered up with the Poe Society in Baltimore and we’re sort of living in this space of the darker side of human motivation and obsession.
H. P. Lovecraft is widely considered to be an inheritor of a tradition that Poe started and so he was a natural next step for our ensemble. But Lovecraft comes with a lot of extra baggage. He was deeply misanthropic and he’s much less self aware than Poe about his own demons.
The Call of Cthulhu is rightfully the story he’s most identified with and gets at the heart of Lovecraft’s twisted vision. We were motivated by the challenge of putting the audience in the room with the monster, and what we found, as we worked, was the degree to which the monster—our monsters, our dreams of total annihilation—rely on us to live and breathe.
We can see this obsession with total self-destruction in summer blockbusters but also in politics and issues like climate change. Humanity’s demons feel like they’re being put on display more and more often these days which has prompted a lot of artists to target the surface, but Lovecraft worked below in the recesses of our collective neurosis and that’s what makes his stories so important to this moment.
Lovecraft is generally pretty pessimistic, but in this story of Cthulhu he gives us a way forward, a kind of sublime hope against impossible odds. And that’s really become the focus of our work of transforming the story into a live experience. There was a lot of effort to conjure this fantasy of obliteration but that’s really in service of discovering a way out of it.
If we’ve done our job well, that’s the journey our audience ends up taking with us.
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Robert Cousins served as the resident playwright for Odd Act Theatre Group in Trenton, New Jersey for ten years. His work has appeared at festivals and venues in Scotland, Canada, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. His plays include the absurdist comedies How the Money Goes and Ice Cream Musical, metaphysical dramas A Wild Play and the Straw Girl, adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, and a series of children’s plays. Recent work includes a collection of historical vignettes, True Tales of the Eastern Shore, performed at Chesapeake College and Lacey Ward: Girl Detective.
