Even when it’s hosting a night of spook-ems, there’s something cozy and reassuring about walking into Jarvis Square Theater, the long-standing pint-sized Rogers Park blackbox within earshot of the Jarvis Red Line stop. In purpose and scale, it’s always felt like a bit of a sandbox, and one of the lowkey but crucial incubators for the vast Chicago theater ecosystem.
Jump Scares, Vol. 1
Through 12/8: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM (no shows 11/28–12/1); Jarvis Square Theater, 1439 W. Jarvis, bumpinthenightchi.com, $30
In that respect, it’s a fitting venue for nascent horror company Bump in the Night Theatre’s second outing, a collection of six horror-themed short plays by six different playwright and director pairings. Each tale takes a different angle on translating narrative and cinematic horror tropes to the stage, from Jacquelyn Floyd-Priskorn’s abstract paranoia thriller Olly Olly Oxen Free to artistic director Garrett Michael McCann’s more traditional killer-stalks-hiker-family story, It’s Getting Dark.
A worthy experiment shows what doesn’t work as much as what does, and—respectfully— Jump Scares, Vol. 1 features plenty of that here, too.
But one strong takeaway is Cole Hunter Dzubak’s A Lot of Time to Think, directed by Daniel Sappington, about an abducted woman (Olivia Wheeler) who wakes up buried alive with nothing but a flashlight and a tape recorder. With her last breaths, she mourns her family and friends, scorns her killer, and tries to withhold spectacle from the true crime forum creeps that’ll treat the tape as morbid entertainment, never aware of which audience will hear any of it. It’s a compelling slice of the macabre that plays to theater’s strengths and elicits a horror-of-the-mind, the kind that lingers in the back of your consciousness much longer than any startle.
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